There are numerous alternatives to Acrobat for creating files in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), but most of these tend to focus on simply converting a file to PDF from some other format, such as Microsoft Word.

What happens if you're not an expert, but you want to change something inside a PDF or add a page from a separate document?

I've been trying out gDoc Fusion, a recently launched tool that is designed with this in mind.

The user interface presents just four main options, selected by dragging a Word, Excel, PS, PDF or PowerPoint document onto them.

Drag the file to Quick Convert, and you can change it to PDF, XPS or Word format. Drag it to Page View, and you can change the text by highlighting it and typing replacement text into a dialog box, then saving it to any of the formats just listed.

Document View lets you open several documents at once and simply drag-and-drop pages to re-order them or insert them from one document into another. Yet again, you can save the final result as PDF, XPS or a Word document.

The final option is Flick View, designed to let you quickly skim through a file visually to find the information you are looking for.

As usual, it also puts an option on the menu bar of applications such as Word to let you save the file you're working on as PDF or XPS as well.

While gDoc Fusion isn't free, it does seem to make creating PDF documents much easier than getting to grips with Acrobat.

14 May 2009