TUAW's Daily iPad App: PDF Converter

It's not often that we can make a product announcement and also have it be a Daily App, but that's the case with Readdle's newest iPad app, PDF Converter (US$6.99).

PDF Converter adds a tremendous amount of power to your iPad; it makes it possible to save almost any content on your iPad as a PDF file. Whether you have an email attachment, a web page, a document from your iDisk or Dropbox that you want to make into a PDF, PDF Converter does it. A tap on an email attachment brings up the familiar "Open In..." buttons, allowing the document to be opened in PDF Converter. The attachment is automatically converted to PDF format and available for further distribution or storage on the iPad.

To convert a Safari web page to a PDF for future reading offline, just add a "pdf" prefix to the URL in the address bar, tap "Go" on the iPad keyboard, and the document is converted and placed in the Documents list in PDF Converter.

The app can also take anything from the iPad clipboard, your contacts list, or Photo Library and convert it to a PDF. This is a wonderful app for creating and distributing ad hoc address lists -- by tapping on the names of assorted contacts and tapping the Convert button, PDF Converter instantly creates a formatted PDF with the contact info for all of the people you've chosen.

It's also useful for creating ebooks on the fly. I took a Word document from Dropbox holding my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, converted it to a PDF, and then used PDF Converter to open the novel in iBooks. This was all done without even getting near my Mac.

PDF Converter has found a place on my iPad, and I think a lot of iPad users will feel the same way once they install the app.