Review: Scansoft Pdf Converter Professional 4

As its rather long name suggests, Pdf Converter Professional 4 is a full-featured package for managing Pdf files.

It can read files in Pdf versions 1.3 to 1.6 and convert them to Microsoft Word, Excel, Wordperfect and Rtf formats using a variety of techniques. It can also be used to edit Pdfs directly or create Pdf documents from any sort of file on your PC.

The conversion process used depends on the type of file. For Pdfs without a text layer, where the text is really a graphic, it uses built-in optical character recognition software to scan the image and extract text. It can also handle text boxes and columns intelligently.

You can choose whether to produce wrap-around columns in Word or put each block of text in a separate box, and tables and graphics are handled automatically as well. For spreadsheet Pdfs being converted to Excel, the converter can detect individual tables and graphics and place them in separate pages of an Excel workbook.

But this intelligence means that the conversion process can be slow. A complex 145-page document with a heavy mix of text, graphics and tables took more than half an hour to convert to Word format on an admittedly slow machine, although the results were excellent; tables were particularly slow, and it was irritating that you couldn’t do anything else inside the program until the conversion process was complete.

One good feature is the ability to handle the creation or conversion process directly from within Word, Excel, or Powerpoint using a custom toolbar in each program, seamlessly starting the right ‘assistant’ program for the procedure required.

The Pdf editing tools are impressive, particularly for anyone who has tried to do any Pdf editing before. There are ‘touch-up’ tools for text, if its font and content are not too deeply embedded, for small editing tasks, and for graphics objects so that they can be rotated, cropped, resized, moved or grouped. Additional graphics and text boxes can be added on top of the existing contents, and the final result can be optimised for fast web view or other priorities.

There are irritations, though, starting with the registration procedure and the nagging online activation requirement. More seriously, there is an assumption that users will be familiar with the ins and outs of the Pdf format and what it can and can’t do. At times it’s easy to get confused about which part of the program is being used, when there are so many different routes into the conversion, editing and creation parts of the application.

For those who do know what they’re doing, though, the ability to set up standard conversion parameters, say, and then feed multiple files through the converter in a few simple steps is attractive, as is the flexibility to delve into the internal processes of the program and control its output.

For example, page ranges can be specified within a document and different treatments applied to each page in the range; forms can be separated from text, and tables from graphics, to produce the right results without having the converter make its best guess from the formats it detects.

For anyone who works with Pdf files regularly and has faced their limitations, this package can help ease them if not remove them completely for a much more attractive price than Adobe’s Acrobat.