One of the nice things I remember moving from mainly using Windows to Mac was that OS X had PDF creation built into the operating system. As a result I was no longer reliant on Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs. Now don’t get me wrong, Adobe Acrobat is a really powerful application and for professional proofing and printing I still use it, however for quickly creating PDFs to send via e-mail or put on the VLE, it was like using an articulated truck to deliver newspapers!
Of course when sending stuff to printers it makes much more sense if they can’t accept InDesign to send them a high quality PDF and the options available in Acrobat are there when you need them.
Of course when you are only “delivering newspapers” then the PDF creation built into OS X is more than adequate and enough for most people.
So it’s interesting to see that Adobe have bought a PDF creation tool, Adobe CreatePDF, to iOS devices.
Adobe CreatePDF brings the same high-quality PDF creation as Adobe Acrobat to your iPad, iPhone and other iOS devices.
Some apps I have used on iOS do allow you to create PDFs, Pages for example allows you to send your Pages document to someone via e-mail as a PDF. However DocumentsToGo which can create Word documents doesn’t allow me to send as PDF via e-mail. Of course of you receive a Word document or similar via e-mail and then want to pass onto someone as PDF, it can be a bit of a hassle to open it in Pages, convert to PDF and then send it. I suspect it may impact on the formatting of the document too.
For these kinds of things I see a use for Adobe CreatePDF, it could be useful for that. You will need a decent internet connection though, as the PDF creation doesn’t happen on the device, the app uses Adobe’s online services to create the PDF, so it sends the document to Adobe’s servers, does all the processing online and sends you back a PDF of your document. They say this is to ensure a high quality PDF, which is why you are buying this app I guess.
I am sure the £6.99 price though will stop a fair few people from buying the app, but Adobe do have a reputation for expensive software, the PC version of Acrobat for example is £301.89 from Amazon