Even good old Adobe Systems Inc. isn't immune to the economic crisis. It announced declining profits last week but also provided a less-dour outlook for the second quarter that gave its stock a shot in the arm.

If your little corner of the economy depends on PDF documents to keep productive, but the people holding the purse strings won't shake loose the $699 Adobe charges for the full-boat Acrobat 9 Extended Pro, here are some other ways of getting your PDFs done:

1. PrimoPDF: Nitro PDF acquired this free PDF-maker from activePDF earlier this month. The company launched a free PDF-to-Microsoft-Word conversion site to go with Primo, and also offers an online conversion service called PrimoOnline.

2. OpenOffice: As Linux gains momentum in the marketplace and more people run it on their desktops and laptops, the open-source office applications suite gets more and more stable. And it outputs to PDF, too.

3. Google Docs: Seemingly in perpetual beta, this Web word processor can take in Word files and output to PDF. Great for resumes and all kinds of office-document applications.

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