This is necessary mainly for business documents where you only want to allow the other part read only ability, and don’t want the other party to be editing any contents of the document.
I was trying the PDFCreator printing client for a while. However this client seems to fail when dealing with much larger clients.
Thereafter I switched to using PDFOnline.com service. This service is not very stable. If you are using the new version, it crashes all the time. However you will still need to go through the new version experience the crash before you could get to the old version.
I tried primopdf.com after that. The result was horrendous. The site’s engine did not take into account the possiblity of versioning within the winword document. I ended up having the original unedited version of the document.
I have tried http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ it is working fine so far. The only exception experienced was an inexplicable note attached to one particular page of the document. Perhaps I should raise this issue to the service provider and have them improve their service to make it even better.
Then again imposing systems on reality, is like catching water with a net, exceptions will always bound to occur.