I always assumed installing Adobe Acrobat was by far the best way to print a Word or Excel document to PDF.

While Acrobat has indeed its advantages, certainly over web-based services like Doc2PDF online, it does have a moderate price tag if you use it only for this purpose.

Because I recently experienced hyperlinks would not be converted properly when printing a Word document as PDF with Acrobat, I decided to look for a dedicated “print to PDF” Office plug-in.

I was surprised: apparently Microsoft initially intended to have a “save as PDF” feature available in Office 2007 by default (a big step for them!). Of course Adobe wasn’t happy with that and forced them to remove it immediately.

Luckily Microsoft has made it freely available as an Office 2007 add-on.

This made me happy as hyperlinks are now properly converted.

I guess the author probably didn’t predict that FPDF, the free PDF generation library for PHP, would be used by a huge amount of projects 7 years after it’s inception.

Although it’s recommended to use something like UFPDF or Zend_Pdf with UTF-8 support, it’s notable how many websites still use FPDF. The package, until recently, hasn’t been updated in the last 4 years.

Last month though, Olivier Plathey suddenly released a new version (1.6) with some important bugfixes and features. Time to upgrade!

If this is a start of more bugfixes/new releases, a subversion repository would be nice.