Review: Intelligent Converters PDF-to-Word utility software

A low-cost converter to turn PDF files into Word documents sounds tempting, but only if it’s accurate

The Adobe PDF format has become so common that it’s currently being turned into an ISO standard.

There are plenty of ways of making PDF files, including directly from Office 2007, but converting a PDF to Word document is a tougher proposition.

Intelligent Converters has just released version 2.1 of PDF-to-Word and it couldn’t be simpler to use.

Designed as a walk-through wizard, all that needs doing is to specify the source and destination filenames for the conversion and, if you need to convert embedded drawings and photos, tick a couple of check boxes. Most conversions only take a few seconds.

The key about any file converter is how accurate a job it does. To test this, we created a Word document with a photo and diagram in it, some justified text and words set in different fonts, sizes and typestyles. We converted this from Word to PDF using Adobe Acrobat and then ran the PDF through PDF-to-Word to recover a Word file.

As is visible from the screen shot, the program managed well with the overall layout of the page, and did a good job of recreating the photo and graphic, but, surprisingly, had trouble with the text itself.

It changed the size of the main Times Roman font from 12pt to 10pt, removed the justification, so there was no smooth right edge and put the text into three, separate frames, when the original had no explicitly created frames at all.

These aren’t difficult things to rectify, if you have access to the original document, but are also comparatively simple things for a converter to get right. For example, a PDF file includes details of font sizes in its structure, so there’s little excuse for converting to a different size.
So, when it comes to the important test, PDF-to-Word isn’t 100 per cent – although no converter is - but most get the basics right.

Vista compatible: No