PrimoPDF lets your print without a printer

Coffee shops with free wi-fi are great but what do you do when you find yourself sitting in one needing to print a document or web page on your laptop? And let’s pretend for the sake of argument that it is ultra-uncool to carry around your own inkjet printer and paper. For most the answer is that they are out of luck and will have to wait until they get back home where they can re-connect their printer to their laptop.

That strategy, although not ideal, may work unless the document you want to print is an order confirmation or other type of automatic web-generated document that may not be easy to get back to when you get home. In this situation, PrimoPDF may be the perfect compromise.

PrimoPDF is a free Windows software download available from www.primopdf.com. Once downloaded and installed, PrimoPDF shows up on your Windows system as a printer, better known by most techies as a virtual printer. It’s called a virtual printer because it doesn’t physically exist. Rather, when you print to the PrimoPDF printer from any Windows application, it runs a small application of its own that assists you in generating a PDF file that can be stored anywhere on your computer.

The PDF part of this process is the most important because PDF files maintain the exact look of the document. So when you get back home and connect to a printer, you can open the PDF file using the industry standard Adobe Reader application, select the print option and produce a paper document that looks identical to the document that appeared on your screen earlier.

“P" in PDF stands for “portable”

PrimoPDF can also come in handy if you want to email a document to someone that may not have the necessary software on their end to view your document. For instance you own Microsoft Excel and your email recipient does not. Using a PDF file as a medium format solves the problem. You can print the Microsoft Excel document to the PrimoPDF virtual printer and email the resulting PDF file to the recipient. When the recipient receives the email attachment, he or she can easily view the document exactly as you intended it to look using the Adobe Reader application, most likely already installed on his or her computer.