I recently used this free online
PDF Converter and found it very useful.
I convert a newsletter of a local church from a Word (.doc) document to PDF and upload it to the website every month. The Administrative Assistant who works in the church office actually uses WordPerfect to create it and converts it to a Word 2003 file before she sends it to me. I would normally open it on my Windows XP system, which has Office 2003, and also has PrimoPDF installed, and convert it to PDF by selecting PrimoPDF as the "printer". This works fine but my Windows XP system is having some downtime now and I needed to find another way to convert the file. My Windows 7 system has Office 2007 but, when I open the document in Word 2007, the layout gets changed and those changes carry over to a PDF file created from the Word file.
I tried the free version of
PDF Converter and it converted the file without making any changes to the layout. To do this, I save the file outside of the email from the Administrative Assistant and then select it to upload to
PDF Converter. The newsletter is a fairly large file and a few minutes will pass before the conversion is completed. The website tells me when the converted file is ready to be downloaded and I merely click on the Download button to download it. They also send an email notification that the file is ready.
The company name at the bottom of the main page for requesting a conversion is Baltsoft. Using the free conversion service requires waiting 30 minutes to convert another file. Users who want to use the service with no such restriction can chose from several paid options. See
http://www.freepdfconvert.com/membership.asp for details.
