Anybody in the business of producing PDF files uses serious (and very expensive) software such as Adobe Acrobat Professional to create them.

For the rest of us it's enough to use a program we're familiar with, and then save our work as a PDF file by sending it to a special PDF printer driver.

Abbyy's PDF Transformer Pro 2.0 includes such a printer driver, but that's only the beginning of its capabilities. It can also process a PDF file that somebody else has made and turn it back into a document that can be edited and changed.

PDF files can be transformed into Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Visio drawings, as well as into three universal formats (TXT, RTF and HTML) which can be read by any word processor or text editor.

Once a file has been converted, it can be resaved as a PDF file or kept in its new editable format. What're more, these features are quickly accessible from special toolbars in Microsoft Office applications.

The hard task facing any PDF conversion program is to create an editable document that really can be edited: one that isn't flimsily constructed of frames and text snippets that shoot all over the place when you try to make changes.

Transformer Pro does well in this respect. In its one-click conversion mode it preserves columns, indents and every other formatting feature from documents with predictable layouts.

However, if one-click mode is used on magazine pages using multi-column layouts with lots of embedded graphics and unusual fonts, the layout might be imperfectly recreated.

In such cases you need to give the program a hand by viewing each page and designating any problem page elements to be text, pictures or tables. Plus, processing long documents can take up to 30 seconds per page.

If a paper document has been turned into a PDF file by scanning its pages an d saving them in PDF format, the resulting file cannot then be searched.

PDF Transformer Pro fixes this problem by reading in a scanned PDF file and using its inbuilt optical character recognition engine to turn it into a searchable PDF.

This is a one-click operation, and provided the scanned images are of high quality, the results are excellent. However, at £60, it will probably only appeal to small business and home offices.

Abbyy PDF Transformer download - try it for free in our time limitied demo

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