This is an application for converting documents into Portable Document Format (PDF) format on Microsoft Windows operating system. Once installed, it allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF.

It is GPL-licensed free software, written in Microsoft Visual Basic, and depends on a few proprietary Windows components, such as HTML Help and Windows Printer Drivers, which practically makes it only available for Microsoft Windows environments. The actual PDF generation is handled by Ghostscript.

Besides being installed as a printer driver, PDFCreator can be associated with .ps files to manually convert PostScript to PDF format.

Xpdf is an open source PDF viewer for the X Window System and Motif. Xpdf runs on practically any Unix-like operating system. Xpdf can decode LZW and read encrypted PDFs. The official version obeys the DRM restrictions of PDF files, which may prevent copying, printing, or converting some PDF files. There are patches which make Xpdf ignore these DRM restrictions.

Xpdf includes several programs that don't require the X Window System, including programs which extract images from PDF files or convert PDF to PostScript or text.