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If you don't want to use PDFCreator, or the built-in Save As PDF... feature - you can use:
http://www.cutepdf.com/
http://www.nitropdf.com/
http://www.primopdf.com/

Oh that's nothing. At my work, Acrobat 9 refused to print to our main Xerox printer and the fix was of course "upgrade to Acrobat X." And well, we just upgraded. Acrobat X is certainly worlds better: instead of merely not printing the document, attempting to print crashes the program. Side note: for your problem, try a free PDF printer, like primo PDF: http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx

Well, who would make the list? As many viruses as there are in the world, there are many times more real programs that someone could conceivably want to run. A company could not possibly handle this list. When I build a program that is only meant to run in my office, I don't want to go around to every computer to add the program name to the list, much less submit the program for review to Microsoft.

So basically that would leave it to the users and IT. You have to admit that there is no chance the average home user is going to be able to identify even a third of the processes listed in the task manager.

Also, what would you do to stop a trojan? Somebody gets an email talking about this GREAT PROGRAM and they go and run it. What then? Does the system prompt you asking if this is a program that should be allowed to run? Because if it does that then the user will just press "Yes" and it's all over. Alternatively, if the system just flat out rejects it because it isn't something that was predefined to be allowed to run then how would they get it working if it was legitimate?

Let's get back to your example, but instead of an exclusive club lets just call it a bar. Do you make a list of everyone who could potentially come in the door on any given day, or do you make a list of those punks who caused trouble last weekend and were kicked out? The difference is that a typical computer is not running very exclusive programs. Sure, a ton of home computers are going to be running MS Office, iTunes, maybe WoW or something. But then some computers will be running something like PrimoPDF (no, I've never heard of this program before now either).

Not much better than pdfcreator, but we use this at my work: http://www.primopdf.com/

PrimoPDF, use it on all my personal Windows machines. http://www.primopdf.com/

I don't know specifically about USB printers, but I use PrimoPDF to do my printing on my laptop, when I don't happen to have access to a physical printer. It works very nicely for me.

-Mike

There's no consistency in file formats, even MS' own products more often than not bungle when it comes to opening an older version of their file formats. ?? What? please cite examples. The only time I ever saw a newer version have issues opening a old files was when lots (and I mean lots) of custom coding was done in that old file. This was with excel (the spreadsheet program that is way to big for it's own good). I have never seen a newer version of word, or pp screw up. I uninstall access whenever I see it. That dam thing is just wrong.

I see it all the time with normal documents with minimal formatting like paragraphs and bolds and such. But the most common problmes come with documents with simple tables and bulleted lists. Opening files saved in older formats, like Word 6.0 (which used to be pretty universally acceptable) on a newer version of word has been broken Word 97 at the very least. Saving as that format in another version of Word on another platform (like the Mac vs Windows) or using StarOffice, ( or I believe even with the same version on the same platform ) will result in bullets missing or wrong or out of place, differences in whether the gridlines are visible and printed on the tables, etc, etc. This is quite apart from the fact that opening a document with a new version of Word converts that document by default and when you go to save it it saves as the new version by default, thus locking your document into the previous version.

There's also the fact that saving a document in any office program as any other format than the native one results in a file that does not look like what you just saved, which means you'd better double check by opening the new file before you move forward. (To be fair this is an annoyance that the GIMP shares as well).

There is no guarantee that the document you save will look the same from one computer to another even with the same version of Office. Default printer settings used to be a major factor in this, but nowadays things like font availability and other considerations are more likely to affect your document. Even Microsoft was quoted as recommending PDF for documents that must look the same from one system to another. Word just wasn't meant for that (despite the fact it was originally touted as a WYSIWYG editor). And now you can print Word docs to PDF anyhow on the Mac natively and on the PC thanks to open source efforts based on ps2pdf, primopdf being one of many.

Still, I never did see the justification in features like bulleting, tables, and simple paragraph formatting which have been around since the beginning of Word should be so different from one Word format to the next that the style of bullets and other such features cannot remain uniform through filter transformations. It just defies logic unless you realize that most changes to MSOFFICE formatting come from a need for planned obsolescence. After all, consider formats like TeX, html, PostScript, etc, which have been around as long as Word or longer, and have many of the complexities of Word formats, have had changes over the years just like Word, but have not required the removal or appreciable change of past functionality and have remained basically 100% backwards compatible over the years. That is because they were well designed and designed with extensibility in mind, two things clearly missing from Microsoft's plan.

Frankly I think putting PDF generation in as a printer driver, a la Mac OS X, is more powerful than putting it into the application itself.

Someone else have already pointed out Primo PDF (which I didn't know about). I use PDF Creator, that works the same way (as a Printer Driver). I'm sure there are probably other such solutions. Before I knew about PDF Creator (4 or 5 years ago), I used to manually install a printer driver (any PostScript capable - HP Laserjet series, Apple Color LW, etc.). Then I would configure the driver to print to a file (that's a native feature of Windows - any installed printer driver can output to a file). As it was a Postscript printer, the file content was all Postscript, so I opened it with a Ghostscript Viewer for Windows (I think it was GSView), and then saved it as PDF. I believe PDF Creator and others just automates this whole process.

Then I would address them as "Mr. Goldberg".

Try this Windows ghostscript wrapper. It installs a printer, pops up a dialog box when you print to it which prompts for a filename, and then saves the PDF. There are many others like it, and all the DLLs and such you'd need to recreate it are out there for free too, but this is the only prepackaged one I've found which is free and isn't spyware/adware/etc.

Easy. Print to PDF. Re-edit. Rinse. Repeat.
In windows, try PrimoPDF -powered by Ghostscript- to get a new PDF with the form filled out, so yo can keep an electronic copy around. If you need to make minor modifications use a PDF editor like Foxit.
In linux a straight print to file and a ps2pdf will do for the first part, and you can edit the filled-out PDF with scribus.

There are a few.

http://www.primopdf.com/

http://www.pdf995.com/

http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm

http://www.paehl.com/pdf/

Yes, there are a few PDF printer drivers for Windows. I've had good results with PrimoPDF, printing documents from Office 2000.

No, but I do know of several free PDF creators. Like another poster said, PDF is not meant for documents that need further editing.

Note, the above links are not endorsements or recommendations

Now what I do agreee with you on: I would also rather pay $129/year and a half, but it is for the ease of use, and east of use only.

Good example - if you embed a visio document into a word document (which you can do really easily) - don't expect the person you send it to have a fully embeded version of vision inside the word doc to add/change the visio drawing. You may even have problems printing a full resolution copy of the drawing inside word without having visio installed.

I've never had a problem viewing Visio drawings embedded in Word without Visio installed... but a way to ensure everyone is able to view all inline drawings of any type is to install PrimoPDF and print to a PDF...

Used this on a major school project and this allowed me to print and view anywhere. Also Word 2003 offers a print to TIFF option but you need a gMail account to hold those documents.