atw: Re: Converting PDF to Word

Take my word for it Christine,

You know me. We've worked together before.

You've seen how demanding I am of my authoring software.

I really push its limits.

The Nuance product is brilliant and worth many times its asking price.

(I would not have recommended it to this group otherwise.)

In fact, it represented a real coup for me recently to get it used at my
client site on a major project for a major telco. (Even our team head
graphic designer uses it now and finds it to be so much faster, easier
and more reliable on Windows XP than the Adobe product.)

Nuance has been especially valuable in a tightly locked down SOE /
standardised desktop environment where the operator can neither
download nor install software updates or Windows service packs.

A situation where using Adobe Pro, which is dreadfully quirky and
unstable with MS Office without such patches, can be an absolute pain.

Come on - don't waste time and money messing around with
downloading evaluation copies of shareware and unknowns that might
or might not be widely PDF compatible.  I've tried other PDF tools that
seem to work fine, then won't load the latest Adobe PDF formats.

For software that we use to earn our living, we should all be using
commercial applications, where they are not unreasonably priced.

If we encourage quality, competitive and innovative commercial software
development, we encourage the growth of the software industry in
general and reduce its move towards a Microsoft style monoculture.

That means more jobs for developers and, believe it or not, for IT
technical communicators.  (Yes, of course I realise that tech writing
goes far beyond all things IT, to everything technical, including all things
automotive, electronic, mechanical and medical - Gosh we tend to
pigeonhole our profession far too firmly in the IT camp, just because
computers run our primary authoring tools.)

Failing to purchase quality software just shoots our brethren and,
ultimately, ourselves in the foot.

That said, IMHO, what Adobe is asking for most of its Acrobat products
(which have becoming big and bloated, slower, less reliable and
anti-competitive thanks to how they keep altering what was an open
standard file format) is simply extortionate.

Adobe deserves to have a real competitor out there.

Now, with Nuance PDF Converter Professional (3&4) they do.

Go on, Christine!  Scare the moths in your purse!  Buy yourself a copy.
The purchase should be tax deductible anyhow.

Cheers,

Micky G.

P.S.  I have no financial interest in the sale of this software apart from
the good karma of encouraging commercial software development so
that, some day, what goes around might just come around for us all.


At 08:47 7/12/2006, you wrote:


Hi Michael
Have you checked out www.abbyy.com against Nuance? Nuance does not have a free trial so I was not able to test it, and Abbyy only allowed 50 pages for each test (save and convert back). It did a nice job but I only tested a relatively simple (thought graphics heavy) document. 

The others were not happening.  My summary...
<snip>
Nuance ScanSoft PDF Converter 4 http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoau/pdfconverter4/standard/pdfc4-standard_au_index.html No trial version Price AU$105. 
<snip>
Acrobat - too expensive
Christine
<snip>




Michael Granat
Write Ideas
www.writeideas.com.au


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