My choice for creating PDFs is PDF creator from pdfforge.org. The price is right (free), all the functionality I need is there, operation is robust and source code is available.
However, something weird happens occasionally after a new version is updated. Printing fails with an error stating that MSCOMCTL.OCX has failed. The failure is strange, as it is simply about ActiveX-component registration that has been lost. Also fix is simple, run following commands as administrator:
cd C:\Windows\SysWOW64
regsvr32 MSCOMCTL.OCX
regsvr32 MSCOMCT2.OCX
Then operations continue as expected.
Note that the directory is 32-bit on 64-bit Windows.
Baldo on :