You can, or at least you could. Adobe make Acrobat which generates PDF files both as a printer (ie. from any application), and as Distiller (which is more complicated but can be fine-tuned to give better results). They did have a product a while back called PDF Writer which was downloadable from their site, though this has now been removed - either way it only created v3 PDFs because it was Acrobat 3 that it was bundled with. If you're just after making a few PDFs, there are websites that do this for you, using some clever scripting and the phplib libraries. If I remember where they are I'll post, but if you look up "online PDF conversion" in google, you're bound to get something. Basically, you upload your document and in return you get a PDF of it.