Discovered a surprisingly useful bit of software yesterday, namely PDF-Creator. It provides an easy (and completely free) way for Windows users to make PDFs, without having to buy something expensive like the full Adobe suite.
PDF-Creator installs itself as a ‘printer’ on your system, so you can create PDF documents from any application that can print, e.g. Microsoft Word, your web browser etc. Apart from anything else, this will result in a ‘safer’ document than a Word document, because all the hidden meta-data (see Why Microsoft Word may be bad for your health) will not be present in a PDF.
I’ve seen similar things in the past, but this one actually works.
Also, on the same theme, I note that the new release of OpenOffice has a handy ‘export to PDF’ feature built-in. Haven’t tried that myself, but that sounds pretty useful.