14 DAY TRIAL // Turning text docs into modern Portable Document Format files can now be done in a few seconds. PDFproducer is here to prove how easy, with only with a few clicks, TXTs can become PDFs.
One of the most widely spread cross platform document formats in existence, the well-known PDF, is designed to convey information that comes in a variety of forms: text, graphics, interactive elements, even 3D drawings. Creating one such file from scratch, however, is not an easy task and this not simply because it would require some advanced technological knowledge.
Aside from using complex and expensive software like the Adobe suite, the best choice for non-business users is to find individual tools for specific tasks and then merge the results into the final product they want to build. If any of the information you work with is stored in the form of text (TXT) documents, you'll require a utility for making the necessary transition to PDF.
Should you happen to stumble across PDFproducer, look no further, in fact, take a closer look at it for you will most likely become friends. It is not the prettiest of the bunch, but surely you won't be needing Sleeping Beauty for this particular job. This utility is very small, only 26 KB in its zipped format and doesn't require installation, so you can get to know it and put to work right out of the box. What's more, all you will have to pay for it is a few moments of patience until the download is complete, no money, no strings attached.
Using this little application is a breeze and the simplicity of the interface will actually help novice users in accomplishing the tasks without any difficulties. The features offered are rather basic and if you want to process more than one file at a time, unfortunately, this cannot be done. What you will be able to achieve, nonetheless, is to build a personalized PDF version of your text file.
The customizations you can bring to the original papers are related to the meta information comprised in the resulting documents. This software lets you input the author name and add relevant keywords to make the file easier to find. Also, you can specify a subject as well as a title, but remember that all these are not must do's, they are simply facultative actions that will not impact upon the success of the conversion outcome if left blank.
Something else you can do before applying pressure on the all important ''Produce PDF'' button is configure the font type, size and page rotation. Again, you may not be so happy to discover that only three typefaces are available, even though you have seven dimensions at your disposal for each of them. The degrees of rotation you can opt for are three in all, namely 90, 180 and 360.
Yet another thing you can do in order to give a personal touch to the Portable Document Format files you obtain with the help of this tool is to define the paper margins. There are some default sizes you could choose from: 14'' x 11'', 8.5 x 11'' and 8.5'' x 14''. A very nice bonus is that you will be able to manually set a custom dimension which then can be added to the list. It would have been nice to have the possibility to save your settings in case you want to reuse them later, but that is not an option either.
It is also worth sparing a few words about the performance of PDFproducer and it's nothing but good news. Thanks to its minimalistic size and to the fact that it deals with one TXT at a time, the application runs fast and smooth, leaving a negligible imprint on the system. However, if you take things a bit towards the extreme, you can find yourself in front of some interesting figures.
When processing a jumbo-sized text file of 3.45 MB, the load on the 1.90 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core CPU spiked at over 40%, with a memory usage of around 8 MB. It is nevertheless understandable to obtain such a high value for the processor activity if you take into account the fact that the giant TXT document spawned a 650 pages PDF in 35 seconds.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
