I love PDFs.  They are great for compiling photos of documents.  Take, for example, the photographs of the pension file for Thomas H. Stanwood who served in the Civil War.  The original documents were photographed by my cousin who lives in Washington, D.C., and was kind enough to visit the National Archives and take the digital images for me.

After reading (and re-reading) the documents, I like to draft a summary of my findings and copy the images into a Word document.  (You can see the completed document for Thomas’ pension files here.)  However, this process is rather tedious.   What I find most time consuming is sizing the documents to fit into Word.   The process can be SLOOOOOOOOW when large images consume the computer’s memory and decrease it’s speed.

Sometimes I just want a “quick fix.”  I may have old photographs or images of documents that I want to convert into a PDF format.   Cute PDF comes to my rescue.

Cute PDF is free.  It allows you to “print” to PDF.

To make a PDF using Cute PDF:

1)  Download and install the program here.

2)  Select an image (or several images that you wish to include in your PDF) and right click and select “Print.”

You will see the following screen:

3)  Select Cute PDF Writer in the upper left hand corner, and click whichever format you prefer for your document on the right.  Click “print” in the bottom right hand corner.

4)  Type the name for your file and click “Save”.

5)  Open your PDF!