Karen clued me in yesterday to an amazing service Adobe is trying out that lets you create PDF files without having to buy the Distiller ($250). I know there is some (what do we call it now? 'freeware'? is 'shareware' archaic, taken over by 'open-source'? But what if it's not open-sourced? 'public domain' isn't right, because almost nobody actually puts things into the public domain, disavowing all rights to them. aww heck, this is another entry in and of itself) cheap software that replaces your printer driver and makes PDFs, but Adobe's option is probably better for most of 'the rest of us.'

The service, going by the oh-so-compelling name of 'cpdf1', is relatively buried on Adobe's web site, allows you to upload any document created by or in Microsoft Office, WordPerfect Office, Postscript, HTML, or any Adobe product, and a few minutes later they'll spit back the document in PDF format, either directly from the web page, or in an email attachment.

The service is free for the first 3 documents you make, and you can get unlimited use for $10 a month or $100 a year. I personally like it because distiller is pretty pricy, and I only make about 10 PDFs a year (and I have far more than 3 email addresses, which they use as the unique identifier for the trial subscriptions).

I haven't figured out how to make multi-page PDFs from Photoshop files yet, but this might be just the thing if you want to archive some documents in a format more stable than Microsoft Word 2001 build#2872.

One thing that's not clear is what happens if my document uses a special typeface. Presumably Adobe has access to all of their own type library, but I'm not so sure about other foundries, like Emigre, Chank, or Disturbed.

At any rate, it's a valuable service which you'll probably remember and go "Oh wow! Now I know why this got Kevin excited" the next time you're sending out your resume, or any other document you want to look just so even when it's being read on some skanky 386 with no fonts. Enjoy!