Adobe Releases CreatePDF for iOS

Earlier today Adobe added another application to its iOS portfolio with the release of CreatePDF for iOS, a $9.99 universal app aimed at letting users easily create PDFs on their iPhones or iPads. According to Adobe, “CreatePDF brings the same high-quality PDF creation as Adobe Acrobat” to iOS devices, with PDF documents that look “exactly” like the original files they were generated from; the app uses Adobe’s online services for performance and quality, creating PDFs that preserve quality and accessibility standards with the inclusion of links, images, footnotes, and more.

The app supports the following formats:

MS Word (docx, doc), Excel(xlsx, xls), PowerPoint (pptx, ppt)
Adobe Illustrator (ai), Photoshop (psd) and InDesign (indd)
Images – JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF
RTF, Text and WordPerfect
OpenOffice and StarOffice documents

CreatePDF works through iOS’s default “Open In…” menu, which allows third party apps to communicate with each other by sending documents to other applications that support specific file types, such as PDF, .doc, or plain text. For instance, the feature was recently introduced in the Omni Group’s OmniOutliner, letting the app export outlines as plain text or OPML to other iOS software installed on device. CreatePDF registers as an app capable of opening (and converting) the file types listed above, and in my first tests it’s proven to be a fast and reliable solution to convert plain text documents, images and PSDs to the PDF format. From any app that supports sending files, you can choose CreatePDF from the “Open In…” menu, and wait for the app to finish the conversion process to PDF. For reference, the app took a few minutes to convert a 12 MB PSD to PDF, with good results. Similarly, a .docx document forwarded to me via email and sent from the iPad’s Mail app to CreatePDF took less than 30 seconds to become a PDF.

CreatePDF looks like a solid solution to convert files to PDFs, although I wouldn’t mind having more sharing options inside the app itself. Currently, CreatePDF can only “open in” other apps, send via email, or print. It’d be nice to have, say, direct Dropbox integration or more online exporting options in the future. The $9.99 price tag might be a little steep for the average iOS users, but quality of converted documents looked superior to me than other apps I tried in the past, and support for Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign documents is also very welcome.

You can get CreatePDF at $9.99 on the App Store.