Transatlantic Thank You
I was finishing up a CRM proposal to send to a potential client today. The final step was to convert the Microsoft Word doucment into a PDF document. PDF’s are great for official communications like proposals like scopes because they are baiscally snapshots of a document that will look exactly as you intend them to look. Word sure can’t promise that, what with all the different versions out there. One of my colleagues opened up my proposal in it’s Word doc form on his Mac and saw a couple pages repeated for no reason. This platform-version weirdness just doesn’t happen with PDFs.
There is a great open source utility for creating PDFs called PDFCreator. When installed, it pretends to be a printer, so any application can print PDFs–PDFCreator doesn’t even have to know of the existence of the application. A really smart solution for creating PDFs–much better than any of the offerings from Adobe, I might add…
As I gleefully saved my Doc to PDF, I realized I really liked having this utility around, and that it has definitely made my life easier. Before I knew it, I fired up my browser and dropped 10 euros into the PayPal account of the German guy who built the thing.
I love the idea of open source software development. I want it to live on. The least I can do is send some digital greenbacks to a German programmer who makes my proposals look nice.
