I heard about PDFCreator from the Slashdot story yesterday on the OpenOffice.org 1.1 release. PDFCreator is a free/GPL PDF creator for win32 that simulates a printer driver — so, you can use it to create PDFs from any application that can print.
There were other apps prior to PDFCreator that could also create PDFs in Windows, but they required several steps chained together (which was a bit cumbersome). However, PDFCreator appears to be just as good as Adobe Distiller — it has a fully-automated install program and configures itself as a virtual printer. So, it’s just a matter of selecting it from the list of printers.
Then again, I don’t have much need for such a utility these days since I just use the PDF-export features that are built in to OpenOffice.org :). And, from what I’ve read, the native OpenOffice.org-export can result in smaller PDFs anyway, since OpenOffice.org has an understanding of the structure behind the document as opposed to the printer-driver which just receives a big pile of printer data.
Is this also based on the Ghostscript PDFwriter like pdf995 is? You can find out by pressing CTRL-D in Acrobat.
Another cool util: Xpdf‘s free pdftotext.exe