There are many tools to convert images and text to PDF format, but few of them are as powerful as PDFCreator. This free tool, unlike some others of its ilk, works as a virtual printer, meaning it can be used in conjunction with any program able to send files to the print queue. In this case, we’re going to explain in a step-by-step tutorial how to easily combine several documents into a single one and export it in PDF format.
- Once you’ve installed the program, the first thing you have to do is set PDFCreator as your preset printer to avoid automatically printing your documents. To do so, go to the Devices and Printers section in Windows, right-click on the virtual printer entitled PDFCreator and select the option ‘Set as default printer’.
- Now you have to send all the documents that you want to insert in the PDF to the print queue. It’s quickest to do it from the Windows file explorer. To do so, select all files that you want to include, right-click and then click the ‘Print’ option.
- After a few moments, the PDFCreator pop-up window will appear, and as they load and appear in the queue you’ll see in the print part of the window the message ‘There are X more Jobs Waiting’. When X is the number of remaining documents to include, click on the ‘Manage’ button.
- Now you’ll see a list with all the documents included in your queue. You can change the order of the list, which will be the order of the final document when they are combined into one. When they’re all ready, click on the ‘Merge All’ button and then on ‘Continue’.
- When you return to the main print menu in PDFCreator, you’ll click on the ‘Save’ button, select the route and the name of the output file, and then you’ll have your combined document in PDF form.
Other details to keep in mind
In the settings section of the print menu you can access additional print properties in PDFCreator. Some of the most interesting are the option to modify the document author or the compression quality and format of the output images in the Image Formats and PDF > Compression sections. (How you configure these settings will determine the size of the output file.)
