If you use PDFs to share content-rich documents, an effective tool for creating, converting and editing them is indispensable. Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 handles all this, but the £465 price tag will be high for many users.

Scansoft has a cheaper solution in PDF Converter 3 Professional, which costs just under £60. It allows you to convert PDFs into formatted Microsoft Office documents, as well as enabling the creation of PDFs from all Windows applications and providing PDF editing capabilities.

PDF generation, conversion and editing tasks are handled by three different tools, each featuring a straightforward and clear interface. We tried out Create Assistant to make a PDF of a document containing text and graphics and it was replicated quickly and faithfully.

PDF Converter Assistant was equally simple to use and swift in operation, although the results weren't quite so accurate. It uses optical character recognition to recognise PDFs and turn them into editable Word, Wordperfect or Rich Text documents.

Our document, which contained text, graphics and a chart, was converted relatively well, although some text that should have appeared on the second page, was shifted onto a third page.

The PDF editing tool was slightly harder to use than the other two elements, but worked well once mastered. We especially liked the dashboard tool that allows you to control scroll speed and navigate through the document at the tap of a button.

All in all, this is a great budget PDF assistant.

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