Review: PDF2Office Professional 5
- Article 5 of 19
- MacUser, February 2010
Your best bet if you need to convert PDFs to other formats.
PDF is a great universal document format, since it can be viewed by pretty much anyone anywhere. Unfortunately, it can't be edited easily, as Acrobat Professional isn't the best of layout tools and not many people have it installed. Being able to edit PDFs in Microsoft Office, for example, would be far better.
PDF2Office Professional is one of several tools on the market designed to extract text and images or convert PDFs into file formats that are more easily edited in other programs. As well as Rich Text Format and HTML pages, PDF2Office Professional can output files as Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents, and graphics in Tiff and other formats.
Once installed, the program works either as a standalone application or as a file filter in Word. You can choose how closely the original layout should match the PDF's, how it should handle font substitutions, what formats to convert images into and so on, and PDF2Office will then convert your PDF. You can set up batch conversion options and fine-tune each document's settings as well, and there's a preview option to see how the document will look with the current settings.
Of all the various PDF conversion tools on the market, PDF2Office Professional does the best job in terms of fidelity of layout. It doesn't, however do it perfectly - image conversion was fine, but we found that with most PDFs we had two choices: we could either have PDF2Office substitute fonts during conversion with Times New Roman and have a perfect layout; or have everything in the right places but spilling over their text boxes if the correct typefaces were used. It rarely took more than a few minutes of font-size reduction to fix the latter problem, although PDF2Office's occasional use of tables to replicate layouts made this harder.
The program itself looks like an old Classic application that's been updated to Mac OS X and its minimalist interface is sometimes hard to fathom. Its logging options rarely tell you anything and its preview function seldom tells the whole story.
Compared to other programs though, it's leaps ahead in terms of its output. If you need to convert PDFs to other formats as accurately as possible and then edit them, this is your best bet.