I just attended a training on a very useful piece of software, Accelerated Writer, which we are going to be integrating with handhelds in a large middle school project I’m helping to coordinate.
The program requires a great deal of printing (like other Renaissance Learning products), and I found the ability to print directly to a PDF file (rather than actually having to print a physical paper printer) to be very useful. There are a lot of times that I want to see the printout results, but don’t actually need the paper and printing to a PDF is the perfect solution.
As a part of the Open CD project, you can download the PDFCreator free of charge. Once you install it, PDFCreator will appear as one of your printers in all programs that print. To use it, just print, choose PDFCreator as your printer, and you’ll get PDF file of the results.
This is also a good tool to use to email printouts to someone or to transfer them to a handheld or some other device.
Mac OS X users have had this ability for years. 🙂
From any print dialog box on a Mac, just choose “Save as PDF” instead of sending it to the printer. You’re right Karen, this is very useful and can save a lots of paper!
(I thought at first your post was about making PDF files on a handheld computer, which would be way cool!)