PDF Forte

PDF Forte is a straightforward application capable of creating PDF documents from Microsoft Office files (Excel, PowerPoint, Word), common and Photoshop images, as well as AutoCAD drawings. It can also make Word documents compatible with ebook readers by turning them into ePUB.

It's not necessary to have Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Photohop or AutoCAD to be able to perform file conversions with this program. As far as filetypes are concerned, it supports DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, PSD and DWG.

The tool gets installed quickly. It's wrapped in a clean and intuitive interface, showing all conversion possibilities on the left side of the main window. This setting can be changed from the options panel, along with others. For example, you can edit the metadata of the new PDF files when it comes to author, title, subject, and keywords.

PDF security can be ensured by applying owner and user words while user permissions can be managed. These concern document content copying and modification, comments and annotations, text and graphic extraction, regular and HD printing, screen readers, and filling forms.

Additional options are only available for photo-to-PDF conversion, such as converting each image into a distinct file or merging everything into a single PDF. The page size, margin and orientation can be controlled too.

The only problem we've noticed in our tests is when attempting to simultaneously convert multiple files with different formats but the same name. Only the first file was processed in this scenario, probably due to a filename conflict since the output PDFs have the same name as their counterparts. It's only possible to specify the preferred saving directory but not the file naming pattern as well. It's best to rename the source files so they're not identical.

Otherwise, conversions were made swiftly and without error on Windows 10 while the app remained light on system resources usage. PDF Forte gets the job done without any hassle and is free to use.