Nuance PDF Converter Professional 5

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.

Author: Tom Arah