Installation

Installing the printer requires an extra step but once installed is easy to use and you won’t need to start a browser session to submit a document for conversion to PDF.

Go to the web site and click on the Free Downloads menu item that is displayed on the left menu. Download the PDF4U printer and install using the default options. On the download page you'll want to click on the pdf4uSetup.msi link.

Printer Features
We'll cover two settings you can adjust to change the appearance or qualifty of your PDF.

To start, we need to get the PDF4U Printing Preferences dialog box to appear. Go to the Start menu, click on Control Panel then Printers and Faxes. Select the PDF4U Printer, right click and select the Printing Preferences... menu option. The PDF4U Printing Preferences dialog box is on your screen. Click the Advance... button. This brings up the pdf4uPSDriver Advanced Options dialog.

The only two items I'll cover are the Print Quality: and PDF EmbedAllFonts:.

Print Quality is the dpi or dots per inch. This determines the quality of the image as well as the quality of the printed document. If you have a lot of graphics or need picture quality then use a higher value. Naturally, when you select a higher value that is going to increase the size of the PDF file too.

PDF EmbedAllFonts tells the Print Driver to embed or include all of the fonts used in the document into the PDF. If you don't include or embed the fonts in your PDF file then what happens when someone opens the PDF, font subsitution occurs if their system doesn't have the required font. Sometimes documents can look a lot different than the original when fonts are not embedded. As a general rule I recommend you set PDF EmbedAllFonts: to true. Again, be aware this will increase the size of the PDF file.