There are dozens of programs available for free that are able to convert your documents to the PDF format easily through a virtual PDF printer installed on your Windows PC. You can use these to print just about any type of document into a PDF files. But this requires that you hop from one document to another in order to convert them to the PDF files one by one. This approach is good enough when you have to convert only a couple of documents to PDF. But when you have a large number of documents to be converted, it becomes rather an ordeal that nobody wants to go through willingly.
Thanks to the developers of the popular PDFCreator application, now you can convert multiple documents automatically into PDF files using the new HotFolder program. HotFolder works in conjunction with PDFCreater, monitors a pre-selected folder for new documents and automatically converts them to PDF files. So now only thing you have to do is copy-paste the documents into the monitored folder and you are done – HotFolder shall handle everything else.
Since HotFolder works with PDFCreator, you must download and install PDFCreator in you Windows PC first. After this, you can install HotFolder on your PC. It is advised that you create a PDFCreator profile so that the automatic PDF creation goes smoothly. As you launch HotFolder, it informs you that you should create a new HotFolder configuration.
In order to create a new HotFolder configuration, you can click on the settings button and then choose HotFolder Setings tab. Click on the green “plus” button, choose a configuration name, select the paths for HotFolder (the folder that shall be monitored) etc., and you are done. You can even choose a different PDF printer to be used in the configuration.
Now all you have to do is copy-paste some documents in the HotFolder monitored folder (that you selected in the configuration in the previous step). Then in the main window of HotFolder, click on the start button in the toolbar. This will catapult HotFolder into action – it will start converting all the documents in the monitored folder to PDF one by one.
Conclusion: HotFolder is an ideal solution for mass PDF document conversions. It can monitor one or more folders for documents, and automatically converts them to PDF documents without any effort on your part.
You can download HotFolder from http://www.pdfforge.org/hotfolder.