Product Reviews

Although Adobe's PDF is a popular format for distributing, reviewing and archiving business documents, editing PDFs is a major problem. PDF Converter Professional 2 makes it easy by turning PDFs into editable Word files and, in turn, transforming Microsoft Office documents into PDFs. The package is essentially a bundle of ScanSoft's PDF Create! 2 and PDF Converter 2 utilities.

PDF Create! 2 adds a PDF virtual printer to Windows so that you can generate PDF documents from any program through Print dialog windows. The installation also adds a PDF Create! menu and toolbar to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, allowing you to produce

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PDFs with one click.

Additionally, a new PDF Create! Assistant lets you generate PDFs from multiple source files in multiple formats, batch fashion. ScanSoft has upgraded the PDF-generation options to support font embedding and image compression, as well as the full range of 40-bit/128-bit security properties. You can even create the latest version 1.5 PDFs.

The PDF Converter 2 utility is a revelation. While Adobe Acrobat can extract text from PDFs and save it in basic RTF format, PDF Converter 2 converts the entire document including text, graphics and layout into Word's native format. You can then edit the document as you would any Word file and optionally export it back to PDF when you've finished. Despite a few niggles, the PDF and Word versions of the document look practically identical. Again, the new edition of the utility supports version 1.5 PDFs, including those containing layers.

The only thing that PDF Converter 2 can't handle at all is multimedia: embedded movies, sounds and rollovers don't survive the transition to Word format. However, for the everyday exchange and editing of business documents using PDF and Microsoft Office, PDF Converter Professional 2 is faster, cheaper and simpler.