Blue Squirrel's 602 Pro Print Pack
reviewed by Rick Fischer

Sheri at Blue Squirrel always lets me know when there's something new at her company. They are the folks that make Click Book - that great printer driver that can take a large document and turn it into a book. It can do much more (see April 2000 Bridge).
This time she really got my attention. She announced: "Make PDF files without buying Adobe Acrobat."
That sounded great. Last time I loaded the full Acrobat it fought with OmniPage and I had to choose between a scanner and making pdf files. I chose the scanner. So, here was a chance to have a nice print utility that I could use to make pdf files.
And, she said it was only $18.95.
What a deal! Acrobat runs around $250. So, Sheri let me try it.

How it Works
When you load Print Pack it loads two printer drivers in Windows. One says Print2pdf. The other says Print2mail.
You open or select your document, select print and select Print2pdf. You will get a dialog box that lets you select color or black and white, the destination drive and asks you for a name to call your new pdf file.
I opened a newsletter I created in Publisher 2000. I do the newsletter monthly. I've not been able to send it to members of the church Men's Club as an e-mail attachment because Publisher is not all that common.
It converted it in a very short time. I compared the original with the new pdf. The pdf file size was smaller - 100 KB compared to 230 KB for the original Publisher file. The hard copy looked pretty much the same but if you'd lay one on top the other, hold it up to the light, you wouldn't see two identical pages. The letters were more jagged on the pdf file. The page was scaled a tad smaller. The Kerning was also set differently.
Then I tried Excel 2000. I took an 816 KB file and converted it to pdf. No problem. The pdf was bigger this time - 1,318 KB.
I tried Word 2000. I opened a 23-page document (188 KB) that was primarily text. It converted fine after I quit trying to save it to a floppy. This file ballooned to 1.6 MB. Fine for the desktop but too big for the floppy. I opened it and it looked fine.
I also tried some older programs that I still use: Ami Pro 3 and Harvard Graphics. Here it choked, needing a dll that it couldn't find. I had to re-boot after attempting to convert an eleven-page Ami Pro document with mixed text and graphics.

Print2mail
Print Pack has another feature that ships with Print Pack. You can go directly from file to e-mail. Okay, you say, can't I do that in Windows already? Yes.
What you can do right now (example from Windows 98) is to select the file, select send to à mail recipient, then enter the e-mail address or use your address book. I am working with Outlook 2000. The file goes as an attachment. The received file can be opened and edited.
Print Pack works a little differently. You open the document, select File à print, select the printer à Print2mail and it creates several files. My three-page Word 2000 document became: Page 000.gif - an 18KB picture of page 1. Page 0001.gif was a picture of page 2. Page 0002.gif was a picture of the table on the last page. Index.htm included all the text less the table. The resulting files can't be edited directly. Maybe the best use of this function is with a picture or graphic and not text.
There you are. Yes you can convert documents to pdf on a shoestring. You just may not be able to convert documents created with aging software.
Requires: Windows 95/88/Me
www.bluesquirrel.com