Product Reviews

With its ability to create a fixed electronic representation of the printed page, Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most important file formats around. It acts as the standard medium for a whole host of tasks - document exchange, collaboration and review, print production, form handling, archiving and so on.

Adobe would naturally like you to use its own Acrobat applications to take full advantage of the format, but there is an alternative: Nuance's PDF Converter Professional.

Key to this role is the ability to convert your original files to PDF. Like Adobe, Nuance provides three main routes for PDF authoring. The first is a general-purpose print driver which can capture output from any application. For Internet Explorer and the most important Microsoft Office applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook now including the latest 2007 releases - Nuance also provides direct macro-based creation, which enables more advanced handling such as the new ability to archive selected Outlook items or whole folders.

Third, from within the main PDF Converter Professional application, you can directly open and convert files in a range of common formats - DOC, JPEG, TIFF and so on. New capabilities here include support for the PostScript EPS and PS formats and Microsoft's own electronic paper format XPS along with the ability to combine multiple files into a single PDF Package - an option that takes advantage of the new support for the latest PDF 1.7 format.

Once your PDF is loaded into PDF Converter Professional, you can navigate and read your PDF onscreen in an environment which is best described as a cheap-and-cheerful copy of Adobe Acrobat - a missed opportunity for some much-needed streamlining. Far more impressive, however, is the amount of PDF handling power on offer.

For starters, you can apply security settings using passwords, encryption, certificates and digital signatures. You can also convert PDFs to fillable forms either manually by adding controls or semi-automatically using the FormTyper capability.

For workgroup collaboration there are a whole host of annotation tools including a new Callout option and capabilities that include the ability to combine comments from multiple reviewers into a single central file. You can also have the text in your PDF read out to you and even save the output as a standalone WAV.

Other new capabilities abound. You can add video and sound files and control how they will be

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played. You can even add 3D files in u3d format that can then be rotated, panned, zoomed, spun and measured onscreen using new Distance, Area and Perimeter tools.

More mundane but more regularly useful are the new commands for splitting and assembling PDFs, extracting pages and comparing versions of a document to pinpoint changes. Perhaps most useful of all are the new imposition capabilities that let you prepare your PDF for booklet printing, complete with control over gutters, spread, creep and binding.

And PDF Converter Professional provides one feature that leaves Adobe Acrobat trailing. Select the Save As command, or the standalone PDF Converter Assistant for batch operations, and you can convert your PDF to a whole range of other formats including Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint and now XPS.

This is far more powerful than the equivalent export capability in Adobe Acrobat which just extracts the text and images, as PDF Converter Professional painstakingly recreates the entire layout.

The first time you see this in action is extraordinary - it's as if you simply loaded your PDF directly into Word ready to work on it. With rich conversion like this it looks as if Nuance has managed to turn PDF into a fully editable exchange format.

However it's important not to get carried away. The PDF conversion is based on Nuance's experience with OmniPage, recreating editable files from scanned images and, despite the claim of a further improvement in accuracy, the results are by no means perfect.

In our tests certain conversions led to a strange mix of upper and lower case. More importantly, in complex layouts, the resulting text is editable within its column, but add extra text and this doesn't flow into the next column and, without the original fonts, the results can only ever be an approximation.

PDF Converter Professional's much-hyped conversion capabilities are certainly handy for example for OCR-ing the odd scan, accessing the content in simple layouts and bridging between PDF and XPS, but they aren't a serious workflow solution. The bottom line is that PDF is still best viewed as an inherently fixed format.

Having said this, as PDF Converter Professional 5.0 ably demonstrates, the fixed nature of PDF doesn't seriously hold back the format's flexibility and usefulness. What does seriously hold the format back is the price of Adobe's PDF handling software and it is here that PDF Converter Professional really proves its worth.

PDF Converter Professional can't compete with Acrobat Professional for the high-end professional design market but, for general office use where the odd rough edge can be tolerated, it offers most of the power that anyone is likely to need. Most importantly, at around a third of the cost of Acrobat Standard , it has the potential to save organizations a great deal of money.