I would like to vent a bit of my frustration in regards to these wonderful things known as PDF printers. Back whilst my ignorance got the better of me (which is like 15 minutes ago) and I thought that these things were the end-all-be-all solution to creating PDF documents from your Word/Excel/HTML/etc. applications, I have come to an abrupt halt on why these aren’t as awesome as I thought they were.

Back many years ago I ran across two very wonderful and simple tools: CutePDF Writer and BullZip PDF Printer. Both of these, among many others, PrimoPDF, PDFill, etc. are all tools for creating PDFs from various other sources.

Getting back on why these aren’t the best, and why they have a special place, one word needs to be said: Hyperlinks. Without getting into a whole explanation of how printing actually works on a computer, I will come up with a simple flow which honestly I never really thought about until I had to troubleshoot why this person’s hyperlinks weren’t creating properly in the PDF. Read more »