Adobe’s PDF format is now popular – a version of it has been accepted as an international standard and there are several programs, in addition to Adobe Acrobat, that can create and edit PDF files.

One of the best-known is Nuance PDF Converter, the fifth version of which adds in several useful features.

There are three ways of producing a file using PDF Converter 5: you can use the supplied PDF Converter printer driver (instead of printing to a printer, it prints the file as a PDF), use the macros installed into Microsoft Office by the setup program to create one from Word, Excel or Powerpoint, or run the application itself to make one from scratch.

One of the main new features is the ability to set up PDF packages. A PDF package is essentially a container into which you can drag a selection of files in several formats. It's a bit like a zip file. An extension of this technique enables the user to archive a complete folder into a single PDF.

This is an ideal way to back up a folder of emails, for example, and Nuance claims it offers a space saving of about 50 per cent. There are new mark-up tools in PDF Converter 5, too. It can create call-outs to draw attention to parts of the document, with a text box attached to a particular point. It even allows users to move the text box around while maintaining a link to where it was inserted.

It can directly edit PDFs, where the existing text is marked with a strike-through and the replacement added as a note. PDF Converter 5 can export its pages to Word and in fact it does this rather better than Acrobat, though it still relies too heavily on using frames within the Word document to maintain the layout of the PDF original.

As well as supporting Adobe PDF, the new version of the program can produce documents in Microsoft's XPS format too. It even does a mean job of text-to-speech, using the technology Nuance uses for its Dragon Naturally Speaking products. Overall, it's an excellent tool for those who need to produce professional-looking documents.