Today, I got a bit of work out of Inferno and emailed an invoice as an attachment. Rather than worry about having the recipient install a couple of non-standard fonts that I use in my invoices, I decided to hunt around for a freeware PDF creator utility. I wasn’t sure if there was such a beast (I’d heard of commercial utilities before) but a Google search promptly turned up CutePDF Writer which I’d heartily recommend to anybody.

As a side note, since PDFs are portable this makes Microsoft Office pretty much obsolete – since you can just use whatever package you want (such as the freeware Open Office) and just send somebody the PDF version to print out. Of course, if you need to actually edit the document in two different places (like home and work), and you don’t have the ability to install OpenOffice at work, then you’d still be stuck. But it does at least make the migration away from Microsoft Office easier in a lot of cases.