DeskPDF Professional offers an almost ideal combination of basic features and clever conveniences. It's one step up from freeware programs like BullZip PDF Printer and far below the level of annotation, management, OCR, and indexing features in Acrobat (with its strong indexing ability) or PDF Converter Professional (with its high-powered OCR), but it includes the features that most personal and small-business users need. You can create PDFs the usual way, by printing from the standard Windows print dialog, but you also get a deskPDF button in Microsoft Office applications and a Convert with deskPDF icon on your desktop. Simply drag any standard Windows document to that icon to begin creating a PDF.

The software's best feature is the single dialog box that consolidates all your PDF creation options in one place. In addition to the usual options for specifying a filename and folder, the utility offers a choice of PDF output quality, and a check box lets you send the PDF as an e-mail attachment. This is also the place to specify 40-bit or 128-bit encryption and privacy settings. The panel lets you determine, too, how the file will display, giving you options for setting zoom levels, adding watermarks, and more—features that other programs, such as Adobe Acrobat, bury deep in their menus. Finally, you can save multiple settings as profiles that you can reuse for future jobs—another welcome convenience.

Despite its low price, deskPDF Professional includes some high-level features: You can convert Office document annotations into PDF comments, for example, and merge multiple PDF files, although the latter feature isn't exactly intuitive. You use it by saving a PDF with the same name as the file you want to merge the PDF into, and the program prompts you to replace the original file or append or "prepend" the new file to the existing one. The dialog box and help facility aren't fully clear about whether "prepend" means that the new file will be tacked onto the beginning of the existing one (which is what happens) or the reverse. Some users might prefer to use a new filename for the combination, but at least the job gets done. The menu-driven methods in PDF Converter Pro and Adobe Acrobat get the job done more cleanly and flexibly, however.

Sure, deskPDF won't overwhelm you with its feature set, but the application doesn't cost much, and its single-dialog-box operation has a Zen-like minimalism that other programs can't match. If you need to do anything more with PDF files than create or merge them, you'll need a higher-end product such as PDF Converter Professional or Adobe Acrobat. But if you're like most users, deskPDF gives you all you need.

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