After Adobe’s own Acrobat application which, even as an upgrade, costs hundreds of pounds, Nuance PDF Converter is probably the best known application for handling PDFs. Read more publishing software reviews.
As well as being able to create these ubiquitous, standalone files from a variety from different file types, it can also convert PDFs to files compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect and others.
Version 8 of Nuance PDF Converter Professional adds direct editing, spoken notes, real-time collaboration and cloud connectivity.
The main editing screen adopts the charcoal colour-scheme of many Adobe products and shows two rows of control icons, as well as viewing options, in a column down the left-hand side.
Importing a PDF file is as easy as opening, dragging and dropping or downloading it and the software has direct connections with Dropbox, Evernote and Nuance’s own PaperPort Anywhere, the latter being very easy.
Editing a PDF isn’t enabled by default; there are two buttons in the program’s title bar which switch between PDF View and Advanced Edit modes.
In Advanced Edit, you can directly edit text on the page, change fonts and font styles, alter indents and justification and paint formats from one section to another.
Don’t expect Word-like facilities, think more WordPad or TextEdit, but it’s very useful to be able to make quick changes, rather than having to move back to an original source file and recreate a PDF from scratch.
Since Nuance makes Dragon Natural Speaking (and is the voice-recognition power behind Siri), it’s not surprising the company has built it into PDF Converter Professional. However, it’s only available for dictated notes. You can’t dictate straight onto the page, which is a bit of a shame.
Nuance PDF Converter Professional 8 includes the kind of group-working facilities found in most modern word processors, where changes can be marked out in colour by a number of reviewers, before being consolidated by the author.
Comments
Chris Leech said: I would have given this at least a 4 out of 5 but the Drawing Tools have been changed from PDF Converter Professional 7 Now when selecting any other tool except for Line you have to select this same tool after each use I do mark ups on submittal documents I just want to use rectangle but I have to click on rectangle after each use because this tool will not stay on If this matters to you as well as me then do not buy this product