Customer Reviews

PDF Converter Pro 6.0 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I have used PDF Professional 4 for years with full satisfaction. While it took forever to load, it was great for saving and editing PDF files, much cheaper and better than Acrobat, and with no bugs. I recommended it with enthusiasm to everyone who would listen.
Hoping to get faster loads, I paid for PDF Prof 6 and have regretted it ever since. It does load faster. But unpredictably, it refuses to open PDF files that Acrobat 8 handles just fine. PDF 6 tells me the "file cannot be repaired" but it was PDF Prof 6 itself that damaged the file so that neither PDF Prof 6 nor Acrobat 8 can open it. But on my other computer that doesn't have PDF Prof 6, Acrobat opens it just fine.
Additionally, PDF Prof 6 will unpredictably report "Access Denied" to an HTM file I try to print to PDF, although it prints to my printer just fine.
Nuance has acknowledged receipt of my incident reports but provided no substantive help.
For the sake of your sanity, avoid this piece of garbage

Bottom line: this is a decent PDF converter that provides all the functionality one would want for basic/simple PDF creation, editing and manipulation at a price far less than Adobe charges. But, for more advanced usage, especially form-based work, Adobe still has the upper hand.

I'm running it on a XP machine, 2GB ram and performance is pretty good - about the same as Adobe Acrobat version 9. I was pretty concerned about installation after reading some of the reviews of version 5 of this application and the problems people had with other applications malfunctioning after installing PDF Converter. So, I selected the Custom option during install, and unchecked the options to integrate the software with Word, IE, Firefox, etc. That went smoothly and none of my other applications were adversely affected.

It has an activation feature like many programs do these days, but it was unobtrusive. If you uninstall it using the add/remove programs option, it will "unlock" so you can then install it on a different machine. I did so, and encountered zero problems. I then re-installed it on another PC, but this time used the "Standard" option which integrates PDF Converter with Word, Excel, etc. plus makes it the default PDF viewer. Big problems! FireFox locked up when trying to view a PDF online and Word would crash whenever I tried to print. Uninstalled it again, and then re-installed using the Custom option as above and everything worked once again.

I ran a variety of files through from Word, Excel, WordPerfect, and IE and it created PDFs without any problems. Basically, you "print" the file from whatever application you're using to a printer that the PDF Converter sets up. The resulting PDF looked the same as the PDFs created using Acrobat, but you don't have all the options at your disposal that Adobe provides through their Distiller program. For most people that will not be a problem, but it could be an issue if you're using PDFs as a platform for sending files to commercial printers or other more advanced uses. The file sizes are larger than what Acrobat creates, but not horribly so (such as the PDFs that WordPerfect creates - those are huge!).

The forms capabilities were a disappointment. I was hoping for a more streamlined, easier to use program than Acrobat when it comes to setting up fillable forms, especially with Java scripts, since I spend a LOT of time wrestling with forms. While the PDF Converter was OK, it was not better than Acrobat in terms of ease of use or convenience and, for several functions, it was less robust. More significantly, the form files it produces are not compatible with some older versions of the Acrobat Reader, a problem I have not encountered using Acrobat. Since I can't control which Reader people use to open my forms, I'm going to be sticking with Acrobat for form design. But I applaud Nuance for the job they did so far - hopefully the next version will be better.

It does do a better job than Acrobat when converting a PDF to a word processing file. Worked great on mainly text-based files, and so-so (but better than Acrobat) on files with a lot of graphics. Still waiting for an application that will do a seamless conversion with no loss of formatting - probably a pipe dream! But, this is clearly better than Acrobat, and I expect I'll be using the software mainly for this task.

Does not come with a manual, and the online documentation was not the best in terms of organization and clarity. A re-write with more detail and organization is clearly needed.

While there's some rough spots, this is a worthy option for those looking to avoid the high cost of Acrobat but still gain much of the functionality in creating and manipulating PDF forms.

When Nuance Communications bought ScanSoft (the developer of PDF Converter), customer service and product support dropped off a cliff. Moreover, when the product is upgraded now, you will pay the same price that everyone else pays for the product NEW, even if you were unlucky enough to have purchased the previous version the day before the new version came out (check the website for confirmation of this pricing identity). The latest version of this product doesn't fix the bugs that existed in the previous version, and if you're looking specifically at converting PDF to WORD, you will be very disappointed. There are other choices for PDF conversion, and other companies far superior to Nuance Communications in reputation and customer/product support and satisfaction. This is a prime example of the big fish swallowing the little fish(which had competed too successfully against the big fish), only to have the big fish reduce product quality and support, in the end. Beware.

I have been a long-time purchaser of Nuance products. This product has been completely unusable because of the activation system Nuance uses. For some reason, the software will not complete its activation. Each week or so, it will try to activate again.Each time it does, it uses an activation. I have this installed on my laptop and desktop which is acceptable according to the license. I have already gone through at least 8 activations. I had to call Nuance after using 6 activations to get more. It was a long-distance phone call. Just last week, the activation notice showed up again on my laptop. I will have to call again. The support time is not open very late during the week, and forget about weekend calls. If you have to have a pdf converter program that you need to depend upon, this is not it, solely because of activation. In fact, I will say that about all of Nuance's products. Until they change the way the activation system works, stay away from any of their products.

When it does work, it works fine, but the aggravation of activation makes this product a one star product, if that.

I have been a user of PDF Converter Pro 5.0 and was looking forward to trying out the highly advertised PDF Converter 6.0. I have installed this on a fairly new Win Vista 64 bit machine with 6 GB Memory and had no trouble with installation whatsoever. It detected the old ver. 5 and everything installed smoothly.

So far I like it. It seems to me that the functionality of the program has been significantly enhanced over ver. 5. I use PDF Converter mainly for organizing my ever-growing collection of genealogy files and therefore especially like the following new features:

- One can quickly create a PDF file from scanning a page directly while in PDF Converter. I find this is a huge time saver compared to my old method of scanning a tif file and then subsequently converting it into PDF format.

- PDF files can now be re-organized, i. e. the order of the pages within a file can be changed. This works very simply by going into a special View mode (document assembly mode) and drag the pages to their new locations. For my purposes this is useful when I am scanning books into PDF files and want to keep certain information together that is found throughout the book, let's say information on a particular family branch.

- Several PDF files can be put into one single file quite easily via a function called PDF Portfolio. One can also, for example, add an introductory page to a portfolio, thus customizing it. This is one of the most useful functions as far as I am concerned because I often have a number of different files on a particular subject. This makes it easy to keep everything together with regards to that subject.

- There is an "auto-detect" feature to detect PDF image files (we all know these PDF files that look like text but are really jpg files). Once such files are identified, the program offers to convert them into searchable PDFs. Regrettably this does not work for image files where the text is in an old-fashioned script. After converting an image file with such script to a searchable PDF, an occasional word is found but most of it are faulty reads so this function is of little to no use in such cases. However, I know of no consumer program that would reliably convert old script so this was expected.

- I can now convert parts of a page (not the entire PDF file) into other file formats such as Word, Excel, etc. Again great if I have a huge file and only need to work with a small part of the file.

There are many more new and improved features such as better encryption, splitting PDF files into smaller sizes for emailing, spell-checking, comparing PDFs directly with Word files, etc. but for me personally the above-mentioned points are the most important.

I would also like to mention that PDF Converter 6 seems to be faster when opening the application and with regards to general processing - except maybe when converting to searchable PDFs. That - depending on the complexity of the file being processed - seems not to have changed too much from ver. 5 to ver. 6.


Final General Thoughts on Nuance, the Manufacturer

I read a review here where the reviewer slammed Nuance, the maker of PDF Converter. I tend to agree with that and almost gave less stars for that alone. I bought ver. 5 only at the end of February 2009 and was then offered ver. 6 in June or so at an "introductory price" that was higher than it currently sells at Amazon for. My attempts to find out if there was a significantly(!) reduced price for people who had just bought PDF Converter ver. 5 went nowhere. Yet at the same time I was inundated with promotional emails and calls. Not something I appreciated at all because any reputable company out there has special pricing or even free upgrades for people who bought the older version right before the new one came out. The Nuance website is a nuisance at best and they do not make it easy for the customer to find support. So from that perspective I cannot recommend the product but decided to grade it on functionality instead (after all, this should be a product review) and only put a note in that Nuance it not a great company to have to deal with.

Overall this is great software and does exactly what I wanted, which was conversion of .pdf files and digital signature of pdf documents. However, each time I started the program, it would ask for Activation, so the real problem surfaced after using it a week when I received the message that I had exceeded the number of allowed activations. After calling customer service 3 times and being repeatedly told that I had to uninstall the software from one of the computers it was installed on, they finally opened up the process. I still get an activation request every time I open the program and the message I have exceeded my allowed installs, but then at least the program runs. The kicker is that I have only installed on one computer, but it is a laptop I travel with. I have an external hard drive, DVD, printer, etc. What I have found is that depending upon what combination of accessories I am using, the software will see a different machine fingerprint. The other problem is that if I am not connected to the Internet, it will not activate at all, so when I am on a plane, the software is useless.

I am going to keep calling customer service, but so far it appears Nuance has created an Activation process that works for some, but certainly not all situation. I suggest that if you reconfigure your computer, do not buy a Nuance product. I support their right to protect their software under the user agreement, but they have gone too far by implementing a flawed activation process.

I've modified my review (formerly five star), the original review is at the bottom.

This program used to work great. Then I updated my motherboard BIOS. Now it puts a watermark on every PDF that it's a trial version. Uninstalling and reinstalling doesn't help. I've tried everything on their support website. I can't email them, you have to go through their web form, which says I'm not eligible for support because I've had the program more than 90 days. I could call them, but it's a pay-for-support service. So, basically, I can pay them to fix their mistake in using overactive product activation, or I can turn my back on them forever and just spend the extra money for Adobe. I think it will be the latter. I, now, would NOT recommend this product to anyone. It looks like if you ever update your BIOS or have to replace something in your computer (hard drive, video card, etc.) it invalidates your installation, and if you've had it more than 90 days, they won't fix it for free. Basically, you get to buy a new copy.

This program loads about as fast as Abobe Reader, and has (as far as I know) none of the security vulnerabilities of reader. Plus, it has nearly all the functionality of Acrobat Pro (I think some of the pre-flight/final functionality is missing, but I haven't looked for it, since I never use it). As far as converting documents to PDF and combining and splitting files, this is the best thing I've found, and it's much faster than Acrobat on most stuff. It doesn't scroll quite as smoothly as Acrobat, but it's editing functionality is better, in my experience. Being able to correct something in a PDF when you don't have an editable document to go back to is a lifesaver. Plus, it's dramatically less expensive than even Acrobat Standard.

I am fairly new to PDF conversion, mainly because I hadn't had much use for it, or so I thought. I had no problems installing and activating PDF Professional 6.0. It integrates nicely into the applicable Office 2007 products as well as Internet Explorer. The customizable installation options are very flexible. Although I installed everything, it was nice having such flexibility.

The PDF Professional 6.0 software interface is fairly straightforward. The toolbars are easy to see "classic-style" button groups, with the simple right-click add and remove, context sensitive pop-up menu. Drop down menus are well-grouped and full featured.

While I went through the software I came to find an exhaustively complete toolset for editing, annotating, securing, converting and sharing. Without having yet read the documentation, I was easily able to convert my test document from Word and Excel (2007) into PDF. I easily converted an existing PDF of text and graphic into an editable Word document and back as well.

I was excited at the notion of making PDFs from Internet Explorer 8, as I'm always doing screen captures of my concert ticket confirmations and bill payments and the like. I was initially horrified by an "Access Denied" error message I would get during the process, but after digging around for a while, I discovered that it is necessary to temporarily disable "Protected Mode" in my "Internet Options" on the "Security" tab in order to complete the conversion. I think a more informative error message would have been nice, but it was worth the trouble of figuring it out. What an awesome timesaver web-to-PDF is for me!

Through continued use of PDF Professional 6, I'm still impressed with the features and built-in tools I discover - there are plenty. I would say it's definitely worth its price (I would never have dropped a couple hundred fifty on Adobe - not dismissing its value, of course). I'm privileged to have been given the opportunity to evaluate this product. I'm happy with it...I recommend it...and most importantly, I use it!

Many years ago when Nuance first started I was a regular user that purchased nearly all updates - however, after the quality of the products began to falter I all but left anything with the Nuance name alone and searched elsewhere. When this came up I thought I'd give it a try although I own Adobe Pro.

At least on my PC machine, this was a quick/easy installation. No "bugs" were noticed to date, it performed quickly without showing any type of sluggish behavior.

Creating pdf's is a breeze but also modifying existing files and saving into different formats. For example, I have a scanned document that needed one line correction and insert of a name change then saved as both a pdf and jpeg. This took less than 1 minute to open the file, make the required modification and save it as both a pdf and jpeg.

Modifying large or extensive documents is a bit less direct - it can be done but became burdensome...then again, I have yet to find any program that does it perfectly at this price point.

This contains several nice additions including watermark, digital signature,
standard editing/notations, security settings etc...plenty of tools to create forms for use online or via email. Familiar outline makes quick work of learning.

For quick edits, pdf creation etc...solid product without drama. For extensive edits...will stick with adobe but for price difference this would be a strong contender.

I've been having to file a lot of insurance claims lately to get back money out of my FSA. Many of the claims are for repetitive regularly occurring expenses CIGNA -- in their VERY FINITE wisdom, forces you to fill out a separate PDF form for every set of claims. But they don't allow you to save the completed PDF form and save it for future use... just print it.

Enter the PDF Converter Pro software. It allows me to save the PDF claim forms, fill them out, save them so when CIGNA "loses" your claim and you have to resubmit, you don't have to fill everything out all over again. If I have a new set of claims, I can reuse the form from before and just change the dates. It is as convenient as using a word processor but without having to worry about messing up the formatting.

However, I am also compulsive about formatting so if I want to create my own form or improve the look of another form, this allows me the flexibility to do that and again, maintain the "data integrity" of the PDF form.

Installation was straight forward and easy... I had no problems getting it to work on my XP system.

Overall, i have tried free programs and they had their limitations. This is definitely worth the price to have the functionality and flexibility that a full-featured software package affords. PDFs have more or less become the defacto standard so it is nice to have the tools to make working with them as easy as it has been to work with WORD documents.