At the Adobe Acrobat page, near the bottom right corner of the page, there's a "Create Adobe pdf online" button. This will take you to a sign-in page, and you'll need to create an account. The "normal" method, if you want to use the service, is to subscribe to it for $9.99 per month (US), but there is a "free trial" button that lets you do your first 5 conversions to .pdf for free. (Available only in the US & Canada.) I haven't tried this service, but if you want the latest features in your one-time pdf document it might be worth a trial. I'd suspect that you do sort of need to know what the latest features are to make this place any better than one of the "free conversion" sites.

Note that this same page has a couple of buttons to get to downloads of the free Reader.

The NEW ACROBAT:

For Windows only (and only for WinXP, Win2000-SP2, and Server 2003) Adobe Acrobat 7.0 has just been released. It does have a couple of nice(?) features, and is reportedly much faster than previous versions. I doubt if many here will want to buy the full Acrobat, but new "features" may appear in web documents for people using only the free Reader 7.0 fairly soon.

The full Acrobat 7.0 comes in a Standard version ($299 US, upgrade $99) that "should be all that most small businesses might want," but it also comes in a Professional version ($449, upgrade $159). The Standard version should put "one-step pdf" buttons in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The Professional version also adds the create PDF buttons in AutoCAD, Visio, and Project.

For people who just want to look at stuff, and have just the free Reader 7.0, documents produced by the Professional version of Acrobat 7.0 can be made so that you can add annotations using only the free Reader. The intended use is so that people who don't have the full Acrobat can send comments back to their editor. It could also help organize stuff you save for your own use, since you'll be able to add a note about where you got it and why, etc.. It does depend on the creator of the document "turning on" the feature, so it's hard to say how much you'll run into "notable" documents on the web.

The bad news (?) for Reader-only users is that both Standard and Professional versions reportedly allow easy "locking" and/or password protection for various end uses of the document, so it may become common to find pdf files that you can look at, but that prevent you from copying text or other stuff from them, and may even prevent you from printing (or saving?) the document. Older versions could do some of this, but the new version makes it easier, so you're likely to see more stuff with these (and other) "features" turned on.

John