Miraplacid Publisher is a PDF printer driver with a twist. Besides doing a nice job of creating PDFs from your documents, it also outputs them in a variety of image formats: jpeg, bmp, gif, tiff, png, and tga for starters. It also allows you to create a virtual printer for each output type and/or settings you commonly use, e.g., Miraplacid Jpeg, Miraplacid PDF, so you don't constantly have to tweak things in the settings dialog.
Miraplacid Publisher 2009 is super-easy to use and allows you to adjust hue, gamma, and saturation to taste. The question that must be asked--and is actually addressed on the company's Web site--is why is the program is better than using the print screen button? Well, if you ever tried to stitch together screen captures of a long document you'll know why. Miraplacid Publisher takes arduous chore and does it in seconds. Alas, you'll need to use this program a lot for it to pay for itself. At $70, it's not exactly bargain-bin fodder. With free PDF printer drivers like Bullzip PDF Printer and BioPDF PDF Writer (both of which offer the watermarking and password protection Miraplacid Publisher 2009 lacks) and free readers like Foxit Reader and Adobe Reader available, this program is a hard sell for the average user. Still, if you've a need to publish documents to graphics formats on a regular basis, Miraplacid Publisher is a real timesaver.
Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.
--Jon L. Jacobi
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