Review: Expert PDF 6.0
Ian Waugh examines Expert PDF 6.0 but finds there's room for improvement
| Product | Expert PDF 6.0 |
|---|---|
| Company | Avanquest |
| Web | Expert PDF
|
| Price | £39.13 |
| We like | Integrates into all printable apps, toolbar in Microsoft Office, easy to use |
| We don't like | PDF-to-RTF conversion could be more accurate, picture conversion particularly poor, functions fragmented as separate programs |
| Rating | 6.5/10 |
| Requirements |
There can hardly be any computer user who isn't familiar with Adobe's Portable Document Format, files with a .pdf extension which can be opened in a browser or with one of several PDF readers such as Acrobat and Foxit Reader.
It's easy to create PDFs yourself and Avanquest's Expert PDF 6.0 lets you do just that.
There are many PDF creators on the market. Most work simply by tapping into the system's printer drivers. Instead of sending a document to a printer, you send it to the PDF software which creates a PDF file on your hard disk. However, Expert PDF 6.0 can do much more than that.
Installation creates the usual 'printer driver' allowing you to create PDFs easily from any application with a print option. It also adds a toolbar to Office applications such as Word and Excel which gives you quick access to its features.
Many functions can be accessed from the main Creator program. However, the installation creates separate applications for functions such as the Editor, a Watermark Editor and Batch Creator. There's even a separate program for Settings. It all seems rather fragmented. Making all options accessible from one program would be much more cohesive.
Good driver
The software has the usual printer driver function which can be used with Word, of course, Excel, and photo software.
Creating a PDF is simply a matter of creating your document in your application and 'printing' it as a PDF. There are a number of settings you can make and you can add a password, allow changes and enable or disable printing. For most users, this will be all you need.
The Creator let you manage documents, insert bookmarks and so on. The Watermark Editor lets you create watermarks as a background to your PDFs and will be very useful for establishing ownership.
You'll probably use the Editor in the main for making small changes to a PDF. It has many editing functions including Bezier, Ellipse, Rectangle and Stamp Tools and you can select and drag items such as images and text around the page in a way that you can't easily do in Word. It's great for fine-tuning the layout.
Other features include the ability to add interactive PDF forms for others to fill out, and the Bates Numbering Document Management system which indexes documents with various data for unique identification and easy retrieval.
Printing to the Converted
The PDF-to-Word converter is a great idea. It's a bit of a misnomer as it actually converts files to .rtf format which can be read by virtually all word processors. It's a simple two-step process and there are no options other than selecting the pages to convert.
It works tolerably well but it has several shortcomings. For example, it breaks each line at its end with a paragraph mark. It doesn't seem to handle coloured text very well (getting the colours wrong) and it incorrectly converts some symbols in some PDFs. For example, it converted the © (copyright) symbol correctly in one PDF but in a PDF it had created itself it converted it back into a € (Euro) symbol.
The conversion of graphics is poor, too, and it degrades them enough to make them unusable again even for an average-quality publication.
So nice try here. Ok for grabbing a shed load of text but it needs a bit more work.
The instructions could do with a little more detail and are poorly translated - there's no excuse for poor translations these days.
Conclusion
The most disappointing aspect of Expert PDF 6.0 is the PDF-to-RTF converter. It was probably included as an 'extra' but it's such a mega useful feature that it's disappointing it doesn't work better. However, the ability to edit a PDF is some mitigation if you only want to tweak a few aspects of a document.
However, for the creation of PDFs, Expert PDF 6.0 is easy to use, does a good job and has a such a range of features that all but the most demanding user will find it does all they need.
