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Amit from Labnol discusses some of the reasons why 3rd Party PDF writer applications may not be as good as the full Adobe Acrobat offering.

The marketplace is flooded with non-Adobe PDF writers that promise to convert practically every file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators [1, 2, 3] as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services go a step further - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-in.

Check the rest of Amit's reasons for using Adobe PDF writers

We used to use Acrobat 5.0, but didn't want to be forced to upgrade so it could work on Vista. We have turned to a 3rd party product, DoPDF from www.dopdf.com instead. We find this works perfectly, and produces smaller PDF files than the Microsoft Office 2007 PDF/XPS addin.