CutePDF offers a free product, the CutePDF Writer, which uses a Postscript to PDF converter, for example Ghostscript(A staples on UNIX-based systems) to create a virtual printer that turns the printer output of any program into a PDF. There is also an optional free addon that requires you to install adware in order to use it. However, the Writer itself has no such strings attached.
For those of you who want to eliminate the free Adobe Acrobat Reader there is the Foxit Reader from Foxit Software. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a bloated and slow program which installs resident on your system, using resources even when not being used, and requires you to wait through a long splash screen to pull your file. Foxit Reader allows you to read and print PDFs. There are addons for the reader that cost money. They allow annotation, saving PDFs to text files, etc. Foxit also offers a Creator and Editor which are available at a charge.
For the simple creation and viewing of PDF files, these two pieces of software work.
