If you’re interested in a single-stop ebook and edocument reader check out STDU Viewer. It offers support for many ebook formats, including PDF, Deja-Vu, as well as the comic book formats CBZ and CBR, and is an excellent program to boot.

If you’re wondering if STDU Viewer is a good PDF reader the answer is yes. Very good in fact, and makes for a great replacement to Adobe’s reader. Here are my top ten SIX things I like about this program:

1. One ebook reader to rule them all: I love the range of formats that it covers, which comprises the most common ebook formats on the internet.
2. Tabs: are not just for Firefox anymore, and the ability to work with multiple documents simultaneously each on its own tab is not only fashionable, it makes for a good user experience.
3. Search: what’s cool about the search function is that, unlike other readers, it doesn’t just jump to the next instance of the text but actually presents a list of results (see screenshot to the right)
4. User-defined double clicking action: STDU Viewer will divide the page into four quadrants and allows you to define an action to be performed when you double click on each quadrant. For example you could set it up such that if you double click on the bottom right of the screen the program would perform a page down.
5. Thumbnails: you could place page thumbnails and the left hand margin and use them to browse. Very cool (see screenshot at the top of this post). This applies to all formats and not just comic book archives.
6. Bookmarks: if you’re reading a document you need bookmarks right? Right. STDU allows you to set bookmarks for later use. It does not store these bookmarks within the document itself.

Wish list:

• Support for: .LIT and HTML Help CHM files. This would REALLY make this program an indispensable install.

The verdict: a very nice program; install this one and use for all (or most) of your ebook / edocument reading needs.

I also like that the program is so well laid out from a usability point of view and that it is kept so simple and straightforward. Now if they would only extend their support to .LIT and .CHM files! Regardless, this reader is highly recommended.

Version Tested: 1.5

Compatibility: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 1.65 megs).

If you are in need of a simple yet powerful tool that can split, join, or extract PDF pages and/or provide a number of other editing options then look no more: PDFTools will likely be exactly what you are looking for. PDFTools offers an excellent range of PDF related editing functions, all but two of which worked beautifully in my testing of this program.

I will present quick review of the various functions below, but really all you need to do to grasp what this software can do is glance at the screenshot above. The only function that is somehow missing (and which to me would have been obvious) is the option to add page numbering to a PDF document; and considering this tool already allows you to stamp a message or image anywhere you like on your document I am guessing that they simply did not think of it. Here are more notes on the various functions:

• Performance: I mention this first because it is very notably fast. I tested all the functions using a 250-page text and image intensive PDF ebook and the tool zipped through all the functions.
• Splitting and extracting PDF’s: can save each and every page to its own file, split even or odd pages only, split after a certain page (or after each user defined number of pages), or simply extract a user-defined section/range of pages as its own PDF.
• Join multiple PDF’s: choose your files, re-arrange them if needed, and join. Can merge PDF documents that are portrait and landscape formatted together into a single document without hitch.
• Stamp a PDF: you can insert text or an image anywhere in the document in the background on every page. PDFTools offers placement presets, such as top-right or middle-center, or will allow you to specify x and y coordinates for the exact location you want your stamp to be. Works very well.
• Re-arrange a PDF: *didn’t work for me*. Or I should say that while reversing the order of the pages worked just fine, re-arranging multiple pages on a single page resulted in the top 15% of each page being inexplicably shaved off. If it had worked it would allowed the re-arranging of 2, 3, or 4 pages to fit on a single page (for example for printing purposes to save paper). A handout option whereby the program adds a column on the right for not taking purposes worked very well though.
• Encrypt a PDF: allows you to define user privileges, such as printing, degraded printing, the ability to copy, change content or annotation, and others (see screenshot to the right). Note that you do not have to password protect your file even as you change user privileges.
• Decrypt a PDF: i.e. decrypt it by providing the password, not by cracking it. This developer’s website reports that this feature is broken in v1.3 and that it will be fixed. Mind you it has been a few years since this version was released in 2006.
• PDF Creator: creates PDFs from XML files; to quote the website, it “allows you to create a PDF document by specifying structure in a XML document”. More information on this here. For myself I didn’t delve much into this feature.

Wish list:

• Auto numbering: that empty space on the main interface is just begging for “automatic numbering” to be added there.
• An update with some of the aforementioned issues fixed. The program has not been updated since 2007.

The verdict: the closest thing I have to a criticism is that in order to use PDFTools you need to know ahead of time exactly the pages or page ranges you want to edit (i.e you will need to inspect your PDF’s using a PDF reader first). This is undoubtedly not a big issue given that PDFTools does not purport to be a reader (and offers so much powerful functionality for free), but I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will see a free visually-based PDF editing swiss-army knife style tool at some point (in the style of PDF Split and Merge).

But wishful thinking notwithstanding, I would say that all in all this is a very nice tool for PDF editing with an excellent range of functions. It is very similar to previously mentioned PDFTK Builder although I slightly prefer the user experience that PDFTools provides.

[Thanks to reader Anand for suggesting this review].

Version Tested: 1.3

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.76 megs).

I’ve written about PDF to Word/Doc conversions before (see the previously published comparative test); and while there are a handful of excellent conversion options available for free, the best are usually web services where you upload or email your PDF and receive the converted file back via email. The handful of local, desktop PDF to DOC apps have typically been more “lightweight” contenders offering far less sophisticated conversions than their web-based counterparts. Which is why Smart Soft’s Free PDF to Word Converter is a very welcome addition to the field; it is a very capable app that can hold it’s own against some of the best PDF-to-Word web services (although still outclassed by PDF to Word Free web service, which is still my favorite).

To test this app I performed 4 conversions (1) the US Form W-4 Tax forms; (2) a typical “read-me” type PDF containing text, images, and links, (3) a table with embedded images and other formatting, and (4) a PDF that is entirely generated from an image source. Here is a summary of the results.

• General layout: this just may be the best desktop PDF to Word conversion app in terms of faithfully recreating the “general layout” and “look and feel” of documents. The only desktop app to output a reasonable Word conversion of the (very complicated) W4 tax form.
• Image handling: is very good in general. MOST of the images in my conversions were imported and placed correctly, with the exception of two images that were inside of tables, which came out blank (although a third such images was inexplicably imported correctly).
• Handling of tables: recreates the “look and feel” of tables but does not create actual Word tables I will say that is more or less the standard treatments of tables in most PDF to Word converters. The only exceptions are web service PDF to Word Free which actually produces Word tables, and PDF to Excel Free (also a web service) which will convert tables to Excel sheets.
• Handling of text boxes: no continuous text; each line of text will be rendered in its own text box, making editing a rather complicated and labor intensive process.
• Handling of text formatting: very good in general; font style, shading, bulleted points, and numbered lists were well preserved.
• Hyperlinks: no working hyperlinks were generated in the output DOC files; this is also standard for most such converters.
• Handling of special characters: I frequently get asked about a PDF to DOC converter that can handle foreign characters (such as Russian) correctly. I did not test for this myself so please let me know how this service fares in this respect if you test it yourself.
• Fast performance: each page within your document takes mere seconds to convert.

The verdict: this program’s PROS include a sleek, well design user interface, and simple, fast, one-click conversions. It also is truly free and is devoid of nags and distractions. A few changes could have made this program much better, including the option to merge text boxes together to create large, editable blocks of text, and better treatment for images inside tables.

Nonetheless, for a desktop freeware PDF to DOC converter this one is probably the best out there. Although as mentioned above you could get better conversions using some of the free web services, there are times when you might prefer to use a desktop program instead (e.g. if you have too many files that may not be practical to upload to a web service en-mass, if the file(s) are too big to email or upload, or if you have privacy or security concerns about uploading or emailing your personal or business PDF documents, just to name a few examples). If you prefer to use a desktop based app rather than a web service Smart Soft’s Free PDF to Word Converter is probably the best freeware option.

Version Tested: 4.2.3.183 (I think).

Compatibility: Windows  XP, Vista.

Go to the program page to download this program (approx 3.82 megs).

How do you convert JPG images into PDF? Typically I would recommend using a virtual PDF printer, which not only can convert images to PDF but any other (printable) file type as well. (Examples of good, freeware virtual PDF printers are: PDFCreator and PrimoPDF.

However, if you just want a quick and easy way to only convert JPG images to PDF, do not particularly care to install a virtual printer, and/or would like to be able to launch this functionality portably from a flash drive (or all of the above), then you should check this out this software. Here are more notes:

• Performance: very fast. Processed 147 JPEG’s (36 megs) into a single PDF file in 5 seconds.
• Output settings: you can specify page size and margins, shrink oversized images, or match image size+margins of the original. Very convenient.
• Formats: "supports the original JPEG/JFIF format, as well as JPEG2000 (.J2K and .JP2) files" – to quote the program website.
• Drag and drop: select the JPG files in Windows Explorer and drag them to the program interface.
• Sorting the images/pages: the best way to make sure that the image files are properly ordered/sorted is to sort them Windows explorer (in the original window), as sorting a very large number of files in in JPEG to PDF isn’t very convenient. To move an image file up or down in the list, right click and select "move up" or "move down". Use Shift+click and CTRL+click to select multiple images within the interface.

Wish list

• Better sorting options: specifically "move to top" and "move to bottom". Auto sort ascending/descending would also be nice, as would sorting by buttons on the interface rather than the context menu.

The verdict: a great little portable tool, especially if you do not want or are unable to install a virtual PDF printer.

I saw a similar freeware app a few months ago that I was testing for a possible review, except I noticed it worked fine for a handful of images but broke down when I loaded about 150. No such problems with JPEG to PDF; it processed the very same group of images quickly and smoothly (plus it has some nice output settings options as well).

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 40K).

I’ve written a number of postings about converting PDFs into Word DOCs or RTFs, including a comparison of free PDF-to-Word options. One issue that frequently comes up in comments and emails, however, is that of converting table-intensive PDFs, where someone might have pages of tables full of data in a PDF file that they want to be able to work with freely. For documents like this most PDF to DOC/RTF converters usually do not output something that is easy to work with. Even the best PDF to DOC converters can result in an unstructured jumble of data where columns and rows are not well defined, and where the data would be very hard to distangle without investing considerable time and effort into manually "massaging", re-formatting and restructuring the data, and having to check it against the original at every turn (which, for long documents, is not a practical option).

This is where PDF to Excel Free steps in. It is the first free service that I know of that can deliver high quality PDF to Excel conversions designed specifically to handle large tables of data and to transpose these into Excel with a high degree of fidelity.

The test: to test this service, I created a PDF report that had a number of data tables and other elements (see image to the right) and converted it to .XLS format using Free PDF to Excel. I also converted the same file to .DOC/RTF using three other free services for comparison purposes (Koolwire, PDF to Word Free, and Some PDF to Word Converter).

Needless to say, for the purposes of working with the data in Excel, Free PDF to Excel was the best solution in that (a) it created an XLS file that I could instantly load up in Excel and work with, and (b) was able to translated all tables and data perfectly, to the extent that the merged cells in the original were translated perfectly.

It is notable, however, that both Koolwire and PDF to Word Free were able to create a .DOC/RTF file where the data tables were converted well enough to allow for easy transfer to excel using some manual cut/paste activity. "Some PDF to Word" fared the worst, creating a useless, unrecognizable mesh that was impossible to work with.

Here are some more notes on this Free PDF to Excel:

• How it works: upload your PDF file into the Free PDF to Excel website and provide an email address. It will be processed for you on their servers and a link will be sent back to you where you can download the converted file.
• Results: converts your PDF to .XLS format with a high degree of fidelity for tables and data, as well as formatting and look-and-feel. Images and charts, however, are not rendered as well.
• Performance: very fast. The email with the converted file arrived in a manner of minutes.
• Privacy policy: can be found here. It promises that your files will not be looked at by a human at any point and that they will be deleted as soon as they are converted and emailed. Also promises that your email would be used solely to send your files and for no other reason.
• Max uploadable file size: is unclear. I tried uploading a 43 meg file to test for the usual 10 meg max file restriction; it seemed to accept and to NOT have a size restriction (the upload timed out, but that was probably due to my bad Starbucks WiFi connection).

The verdict: an excellent service. Although most people with PDF conversion needs are probably looking to convert them to Word DOC/RTF files, for those with data tables in their documents this service will prove invaluable. Simply terrific.

Compatibility: All platforms, all browsers.

Go to the PDF to Excel Free site.

PDF to Word Free

I have looked at a number of free PDF to DOC/RTF conversion options (see the previously published comparative test). I will say straight off the bat that this is the most impressive free conversion service that I have come across; their slogan “the most accurate PDF to Word converter”, at least when it comes to free conversion services, is right on the money. I will qualify this statement a little but by saying that this is still in private beta and therefore it is hard to determine whether it will eventually suffer from some of the reliability and/or server overload issues that afflict some other similar services (such as Koolwire which I have recommended elsewhere).

Please note that the developers have generously offered to make private-beta invites available for Freewaregenius readers. Check the “registration” section at the bottom of this posting under “Compatibility” for the invite code.

I used this service to convert a number of documents that contain a number of elements: images, tables, hyperlinks, bullets, numbered-lists, and various text formatting. Here are more notes on this service (as well as results):

• Max uploadable file size: is 10 megs. For larger files you might want to split these into manageable parts using something like PDF Split and Merge or PDFTK Builder.
• Performance: very fast. The email with the converted file arrived in a manner of minutes. It would be interesting to see if this will change once the service is out of private beta and is handling a higher level of traffic and conversion requests.
• Privacy policy: I am paraphrasing their privacy policy which can be found here. It promises that your files will not be looked at by a human at any point and that they will be deleted as soon as they are converted and emailed. Also promises that your email would be used solely to send your files and for no other reason.

Conversion results:

• Image handling: was excellent. The images were imported and placed correctly within the document (even for images inside tables). No non-image elements such as tables or formatting were converted to images (which sometimes happens in other programs/services).
• Tables: handles tables perfectly; the DOC file actually contained an editable table in the right place. This is the only free service/program of its kind that does this as far as I know.
• Handling of text and/or text boxes: produced a continuous text uninterrupted by carriage returns at the end of each line and without being dispersed into random floating text boxes (all of which may be encountered in other conversion services). The resulting text is perfectly suited for editing with MS Word or a similar editor.
• Handling of text formatting: easily the best I have ever seen. Shading in tables was handled correctly, as was font style and color. Most bulleted points and numbered list were correct, although there were some discrepancies here but they were few and far between. It even correctly created working hyperlinks that correspond to the original PDF.
• Handling of special characters: I frequently get asked about a PDF to DOC converter that can handle foreign characters (such as Russian) correctly. I did not test for this myself so please let me know how this service fares in this respect if you test it yourself.

The verdict: in terms of conversion quality this is hands down the best free PDF to DOC/RTF converter that I have seen; there is simply nothing that comes close. What remains to be seen, however, is how reliable the service will be once it is officially launched and inundated with conversion requests. I am hopeful that they will handle the logistics with the same care and attention that they have poured into the product itself. Simply terrific!

Version Tested: beta.

Compatibility: browser based.

Registration: use the invite code “nitro” and a working email address to register (you may need to wait up to an hour or so). If the invite code does not work then it is probably because they’ve maxed out on beta invites they are giving out and you may need to wait for the official launch.

Go to the PDF to Word Free page to use this service.

If you work with PDFs then you’re likely to have found yourself in a situation where, say, you need to extract individual pages or sections from a PDF document, merge pages from one PDF with another, or split your document into pages or sections, etc. There are a number of freeware programs that help you perform these and other functions (e.g. PDFTK Builder, PDF Tools), but this version of PDF Split and Merge (ver. 2) is different from ver 1.x and unique amongst the free PDF editors that I have seen in that it adds a “visual” component where individual pages are represented as thumbnails that you can interact with (so, for example, drag and drop to reorder, or right click to rotate or delete etc).

This software is in alpha: please note that this version of PDF Split and Merge 2 is still in alpha stage and therefore may not be 100% reliable. I will say that in my testing so far it has run flawlessly.

Here’s a summary of supported functions:

• Visual reorder: this function allows you to load a PDF document and then reorder the pages by manually dragging and dropping them in the order that you want. You could also right click to rotate pages or otherwise delete them.
• Merge/extract: a single interface to do both extracting and merging. Allows you to specify which pages from which document should appear in the output file; use page ranges (e.g. 5-10) or pages separated by commas (e.g. 1,5,9), or both.
• Visual document composer: the “visual” version of merge/extract above. It is similar to visual reorder, except you can drag and drop individual pages from many documents that are open simultaneously and use those to create an output document (see first screenshot above). You can also right click to rotate or delete.
• Alternate mix: this function takes 2 PDF documents (and only two) and merges them such that a page from the first will alternate with one from the second. It will allow you reverse the order of either of the two documents if you need to.
• Split: rules-based splitting for a single document. Split into single pages, odd, even, after a certain page, after every nth page, by bookmarks leve, or by size on disk.
• Global options: for all saved documents with PDF Split and Merge it allows you to specify which PDF version to save with (the version of the original document, ver. 1.5, ver. 1.6, or ver. 1.7). It also allows you to specify whether or not you would like output to a compressed PDF document.
• Source code: is available for download.

But is it free? I am not sure if the final (compiled) version of this program will be free, although the source code is freely downloadable. For ver. 1.x the author maintains two versions, basic and enhanced. And while the former is completely free you can obtain the latter in exchange for a donation of any amount, even $1. I am assuming the same will be true for ver. 2.x (and is definitely worth the small donation).

The verdict: a terrific product that works really well. Two things impress; (1) the visual component of dragging and dropping page thumbnails and editing using right-click, and (2) the “page selection” aspect of the “Merge/Extract” function which allows you to extract pages from PDFs and re-combine them in a single operation.

This product lacks some functions which are sometimes found in free PDF editors such as watermarking, adding page numbers, permissions, metadata and bookmark management, and decrypting/encrypting. Keeping my fingers crossed that at least a couple of these will find their way into the final version, yet nonetheless as it is this program still manages in my view to be in a league of its own. Highly recommended!

Version Tested: 2.0.0 Alpha

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, Mac. Requires Java Virtual Machine 1.6

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 5.07 megs).

Impressive is a free multi-platform app that can display any PDF file or folder containing image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF and BMP) as a slideshow presentation. It can be used to present PDFs or images as full-screen PowerPoint-style presentations or it can function as a full-screen reader. “Impressive” also offers a combination of sophisticated slide transition effects and a number of practical presentation tools, including spotlight effects, box highlighting, zooming in, and an overview screen that displays slides as thumbnails and allows for quick navigation.

I attended a conference last year where most presenters, subsequent to giving their presentations, made them available online for attendees. What I noticed, however, was that almost all of the dozens of presentations provided where in PDF format; and not a single one was provided in the original PowerPoint file (although I am certain most where created using the Microsoft program). I noticed the same thing at a recent webinar I attended; the emailed presentation, when it materialized, was published as a PDF.

If you use or publish presentations as PDFs or as image files this program will be a delightful addition to your repertoire of tools. (Or indeed if you use it as a full-screen PDF reader you will like it as well). It does the following:

1. Present any PDF file or images folder full screen as a slideshow in the same manner as a PowerPoint presentation.
2. Will introduce some very nice alpha-blended smooth transitions between slides that greatly enhance the visual experience
3. Provides a handful of very useful presentation tools that most will find really practical.

Here are more notes on this program:

• How to use: the program does not have a GUI interface; you can either drag and drop your PDF file or folder containing images onto the impressive executable or run it at the command line “impressive pres.pdf”. For the command line a number of parameters are available, such as automatic advance in x seconds, specifying the aspect ratio, setting the screen resolution and others. You can also easily create shortcuts that will open your presentations; see below.
• The Overview Screen: pressing tab will display the overview screen (see screenshot above). This allows for quick navigation into any slide you want.
• Other presentation tools: spot-lighting, rectangular-shaped highlighting, and zooming-in.
• Portable: unzip and run, no installation necessary.
• Creating shortcuts that will launch your presentations: (a) place your PDF in the same folder as “Impressive”; (b) right click on Impressive.exe and create shortcut; (c) right click on the shortcut’s “properties”; (d) in the “target” field, add the name of the PDF (including the extension) after impressive.exe, with a single space between them. Finally (e) you can rename your shortcut as appropriate, place it anywhere, and click on it to launch your presentation.

Wish list:

• A GUI: where you could, say, specify viewing parameters for your presentation then save as a shortcut that will launch it.
• Support for compressed folders: i.e. a compressed folder containing images, including comic book archives in CBZ and CBR, which will make Impressive into a comic book reader as well.

The verdict: a very original program that is simply terrific! If you frequently give presentations and use PDF or image formats, this program is definitely for you. You will also like it if you have presentations in PDF format or PDF files that you prefer to watch full-screen as slideshow-style presentations. Or if you simply want a tool that will display folders of images as slideshows with some nice transitions and the ability to zoom in or highlight elements in your slideshow.

Version Tested: 0.10.2

Compatibility: Windows, Linux, MacOS X.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 10.1 megs).

An interesting little gem that puts many of your favorite comic strips at your fingertips for quick browsing. Here are some notes on this program:

• Available comics: the version I tested supported 156 comics including well known entries such as Garfield, Doonesbury, Fox Trot, Ziggy, Andy Capp, Dick Tracy, Gil Thorp, etc; however, some of my favorites were conspicuously absent, such as Dilbert, The Far Side, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes. A quick peek into the INI file seems to suggest that the source for these comics may be http://www.ucomics.com/.
• How to use: select your desired strip from the dropdown, then click on the "back" or "next" buttons to scroll backwards and forward in time (the button in the middle is "today’s comic"). Alternately you can select the date you want from the date dropdown and zoom straight into the comic strip for that particular date (note: not all comics have a daily edition, and if you choose a day for which no strip exists there will be a bit of a lag as the software tries to download a nonexistent entry before it finally gives up).
• Slide show: this one is a bit easy to miss. Click on the little "slide show" icon in the bottom right and then set the direction for the slideshow (backwards or forward in time, using the "back" or "next" buttons).
• History: what is truly amazing is that you can go back in history to the very beginning for these comics (although I’m not sure if this applies to all of them). For example I was able to view the first Garfield strips dating back to 1978.
• No install: simply unzip this program and run. All comics will be downloaded and stored locally inside the program folder.
• Offline browser: when offline, ComiX can still browse any strips that you were viewed previously that it saved locally.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better)

• The ability to bookmark comic strips as "favorites" for quick access.
• Adding the following comics would be cool: Dilbert, The Far Side, Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes.
• A description and/or a Wikipedia entry for each comic strip that tells something about it would also be supercool.

The verdict: this program that can be a lot of fun especially if the comics you like are amongst the ones supported. Although all of the comics are available online and you could look them up on Google if you chose to do so, it is nice to have them all in the same place, which is also especially conducive to exploring/discovering comic strips that you previously were not aware of.

Version Tested: 0.2.1.24

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to program page to download the latest version (approx 96.7K).

I’ve previously written a comparative review free of PDF to Word DOC solutions, comprising mostly online converting services. I concluded then that the email/online service Koolwire performed the best conversions; however in many cases a local, desktop based program is more desirable than an online service: say, for sensitive business (or other) documents, when you do not have access to an internet connection, when you  simply do not want to send your documents back and forth online for whatever reason (e.g. you  have a great many large size documents that you want to convert), or when the online service you are using is not responsive, which can occur frequently without explanation.

Some PDF to Word converter does a competent job in general. Here are some notes on this program:

• Handling of tables: does not convert tables; rather, the actual table structure is represented as an image, with a text window overlaid on top that lumps all text from all columns together. The treatment adopted here is not my favorite but its quite functional, given that my experience with PDF to DOC converters in general is that tables are always “worked around” in one way or another, never actually converted as such.
• Handling of images: images imported and placed where they’re supposed to be. Note that you will come across PDFs where the pages are in fact images in their entirety and will be processed simply as images, with no extractable text or other elements.
• Handling of text: what’s interesting is that Some PDF to Word Converter allows you to choose whether or not you want to use text boxes (and whether to merge these to get only a single text box); also whether or not to use line breaks. If unsure as to what you want, simply use the default settings.
• Text formatting: varies somewhat with the text handling settings used. In general quite good although in some instances will, for example, bold the entire paragraph instead of the headline. Numbered points in my test converted fine but the bullets disappeared from the bulleted test. Clickable URLs in the original PDF were not converted into clickable links in the DOC file.
• Other formatting: shading was not reproduced in the resulting document.
• Batch processing: one of the coolest thing about this program is the ability to load up a number of PDFs and perform batch-processing.
• Other settings: aside from the text processing settings already mentioned, you can remove all graphs, pics from your converted document, you can define the degree of “zoom” that the doc opens up to, and you can tell it exactly which range of pages from the original document to convert.

The verdict: this is one of only three PDF to DOC conversion programs that run locally (others being email and/or web services), and is probably the best of the three – see my comparison review for the others. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it remains free and, unlike another program that I also reviewed on this site, will not start requiring registration and/or send you to a website before you can use it.

Note: when I first tried “Some PDF to Word Converter” v1.0 it actually produced an error midway through the conversion, but that has been fixed with this newer version. Overall it is a robust product that does what it purports to do and provides very good performance generally.

Version Tested: 1.1

Compatibility: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Internet Explorer 4.1 or later. 800×600 screen resolution.

Go to the program page for more info, or the download page to download the latest version (approx 784K).

In order to do this test I created a PDF document using Open Office’s export to PDF function that had the following elements (1) a two-column table with special formatting, which contained (2) three thumbnail-szied jpeg images. My PDF document also contained (3) working hyperlinks; and (4) it featured text that was bolded; (5) contained bulleted points, as well as (6) a numbered list.

For the sake of simplicity my PDF was only a single page. To see what the document looked like click on the screenshot to the right.

The objective: was to get a converted document that could be loaded into MS Word where the text/contents could be edited and subsequently saved as .DOC format, which is to say any of the following formats would be satisfactory: .DOC, .HTML, and .RTF.

Comparative results: look for them at the bottom of this positng.

#1: PDF2HTMLgui: this is a GUI for the open source PDF2HTML. It took me a long time to find this on the net, as the project seems to have been abandoned (download link provided below). Some notes on this one:

• Very straightforward interface.
• You will need to point the program to both the PDF2HTML executable. You will also need to download and install Ghostscript and point it to that.
• Note: use the “no frames” option to get a single HTML file rather than an index page that points to the different individual pages of your document.
• Download link: click here to download. Note that the zip archive contains both PDF2HTMLgui and PDF2HTML v0.39. You can go to the PDF2HTML project page to check for newer versions of the latter (at the time of this writing there was an experimental version 0.40 available, which I did not test). Go here to download the latest version of Ghostscript.
• The results: see the results section below

#2: Koolwire (doc[at]koolwire.com): Koolwire is a web service that allows you to upload a PDF file or send it via email as an attachment, will convert it to RTF format for you, and will email the converted document back. Here are more notes on this one.

• You can email a file that is less than 10 megs in size. Files over 10 megs can be uploaded through the Koolwire website Koolwire also provides conversion to PDF, MP3, and WAV
• Once I had sent in my email to “doc[at]koolwire.com”with my document attached (subject lines and message content do not matter), I received the converted document in within two minutes, as an attachement (not a download link).
• Privacy policy: their legal blurb states that users will not receive any unsolicited emails at any point. They also maintain “the right (but not the obligation) to verify Content (i.e. view your documents) at their sole discretion”.
• Results: see the results section below.

#3: Zamzar: this is a web-based file conversion service that I first reviewed in Feb, 2007. Zamzar will let you upload a file through its web interface, convert it, then email you a download link. It covers a very wide range of possible input and output formats. More notes as follows:

• Max uploadable file size is 100 megs in the free version.
• Response time: is variable: I converted three documents over 3 days. For two of these that were performed mid-day it took two hours to get my download link. A third file that was uploaded past midnight took around 5 minutes.
• Privacy policy: your files are deleted once the conversion happens and the converted files are deleted once the download link expires. Also, to quote “files stored for download are only accessible by Zamzar”. Another quote: “Zamzar does not rent, sell, or share your personal information or email address with any other companies.” Not sure if they will send you promotional emails, but I have not received any.
• Results: see the results section below.

#4: Free PDF to Word Converter: this is a program that, when I first tested it seemed to finally provide a fully freeware PDF to Word solution. What I did not realize that after a while the program starts asking for one-off registration keys that you can visit a page and obtain a free code. More notes on this program:

• You will need to get a key every time you do a conversion, which involves visiting a page full of ads and solving a math problem (no joke). The end result is a kind of innovative – and very annoying – nag screen that moreover prevents the use of this tool if you are not connected to the internet.
• Performance: once you do get the registration key the program converts your document very quickly.
• Results: see the results section below.

#5: Adobe email conversion service (pdf2html[at]adobe.com): Adobe provides a PDF conversion service by email similar to #5: Koolwire (#2 above). However, it seems that only conversion to HTML is offered (no RTF or DOC). For more info, go here. Here are more notes on this one.

• The PDF file to convert is sent to “pdf2html[at]adobe.com], the subject and message content are not important. Adobe also provides conversion to TXT (pdf2txt[at]adobe.com).
• It took about a minute to get my converted file sent to me by return email once I had sent the document it. This arrived as an attachement (not a download link).
• Privacy policy: not sure, but I assume its the same as the others above.
• Results: see the results section below.

#6: Media-Convert web service: another web-based file conversion service simialar to Zamzar (Freewaregenius review here, Nov 2006). You can upload your file up to a max of 150 megs to Media-Convert and download the converted version. Here are more notes on this service.

• You do not need to provide an email address to use the service (nothing is emailed to you).
• Supports many input and output filetypes. I converted PDF to RTF
• Unlike Zamzar, you do not have to wait for hours between uploading your file and downloading the converted file (my file converted and I got a download link in under 1 minute).
• Privacy policy: not sure, but I assume its the same as the others mentioned above.
• Results: see the results section below.

Comparison of Results:

Image handling:

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: although the images were imported into the converted documented, they were not placed in their proper location on the page but simply placed on the top of the document.
• (2) Koolwire: did an excellent job for both importing and placement of images. Best treatment.
• (3) Zamzar: all three images plus the visual formatting of the table were converted into one image. The document seems to have been split into “text” and a single image comprising all visual elements.
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: imported images more or less with the right placement.
• (5) Adobe email service: simply truncated/did away with the table and all its contents, including the images. I am not sure if it would have otherwise imported images if they were not inside a table.
• (6) Media-Convert: imported images more or less with the right placement.

Handling of the table: none of the resulting documents actually contained an editable table; tables were generally “recreated” using floating text boxes that aimed to approximate the layout and look of the original table:

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: did not recreate a table or its formatting; the contents of the table were “flattened” into a single column
• (2) Koolwire: did the best job of “recreating” the table using text boxes, including producing the most faithful re-creation of the formatting. Best treatment.
• (3) Zamzar: created text boxes that approximated the placement of the text inside the table fairly well. The visual formatting of the table was converted into a background image (that moreover included all images on the page, see the images section above).
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: although it ignored the table and its formatting, this meant that you at least didn’t have to deal with a large number of floating text boxes. The placement of the text was faithful to where it was located inside the table.
• (5) Adobe email service: simply truncated/did away with the table and all its contents, including the images.
• (6) Media-Convert: set to re-create the table using floating text boxes, but did not handle the table’s formatting. Both the text and images were more or less correctly placed where they otherwise would have been inside the table.

Handling of text and/or text boxes : this is probably the most important element, since it is probably safe to assume that the point of converting a PDF to Doc is to allow for editing the text of the document.

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: the text was re-cast into a single column, but the continuity of the text was interrupted by carriage returns at the end of each line.
• (2) Koolwire: employed a continuous text without carriage returns, most conducive to easy editing. Best treatment.
• (3) Zamzar: continuous text in a single text box, but with carriage returns at the end of each line.
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: continuous text in a single text box, but with carriage returns at the end of each line.
• (5) Adobe email service: the text that was imported (text outside the table) was continuous text without carriage returns.
• (6) Media-Convert: each line of text was its own text box, crowding the page with dozens of separate text boxes and making the editing process very complex and time consuming.

Handling of text formatting: this comprises font style and color, bulleted points, numbered list, and working hyperlinks

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: the formatting was preserved, including style, font color, bullet points, and numbered list. Hyperlinks were preserved.
• (2) Koolwire: same as above.
• (3) Zamzar: same as above.
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: same as above, except no working hyperlinks.
• (5) Adobe email service: not enough info, because the table was removed. Bullet points and numbered lists were preserved, as was the text style.
• (6) Media-Convert: each text box had a single text style (e.g. if there was a bolded word in a row the entire row was bolded). Bullet points, and numbered list preserved, Hyperlinks not working.

Best way to load into MS Word:

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: open the HTML file with a browser then select the contents of the page and paste into Word and save as DOC format. This will get rid of the dependency on external image files.
• (2) Koolwire: simply open RTF file with Word.
• (3) Zamzar: simply open DOC file with Word.
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: simply open DOC file with Word.
• (5) Adobe email service: same as #1 above.
• (6) Media-Convert: simply open RTF file with Word.

The verdict:

• (1) PDF2HTMLgui: a good choice if your document does not contain tables or if you do not care to email and/or upload your file to a web service. You might need to do a good degree of manual work to re-constitute your document though.
• (2) Koolwire: the best all-round solution, and the best at handling all of the different elements. A Freewaregenius PICK.
• (3) Zamzar: does an OK job, but has 2 strikes against it. (1) The unpredictability of lag time between the time you upload your file to the time you get your link (which can take a couple of hours), and (2) the way it lumps all visual elements/images into a single background image.
• (4) Free PDF to Word Converter: does an OK job, but not great, and is simply too annoying with the visiting a web page and obtaining a code business every single time you need to run a conversion.
• (5) Adobe email service: a big disappointment.
• (6) Media-Convert: is an OK option. The handling of text rows each in its own text box is a big liability though, and can translate into lots of manual work if you are interested in editing the text.

Lastly, if you know of a free PDF to DOC conversion service that was not covered here please let me know.

I am 36 years old, and one of the facts of life which I have come to terms with is the following: I will never read all the books that I would like to read. In fact, I will most likely never read all the books that I have already purchased, hoping that I might someday get to them. Unlike some people (my wife, for example, who can zip through books) it simply takes me too much time to read a book; there is simply too much thinking, reflection, and daydreaming involved for me to get through texts as efficiently as I would like.

Which is why this program piqued my interest as soon as I lay eyes on it. What WordFlashReader does is open and display electronic texts such that only one word or a chunk of text is displayed in large font on a dark background at any one time. The flashing word(s) move through the text in quick succession, with some considerable degree of control allowed the user in terms of display speed, size of the displayed chunk, and the behavior of the text with regard to punctuation. This system of reading is supposed to have the following effects:

• Comfort: it is supposed to be more comfortable on the eyes than the normal method of reading. Although it takes a bit of getting used to at first, I can see that how this might be the case.
• Efficiency: because the stream of words served is constant and uninterrupted, the user is forced to keep with the pace, although he/she can control the display speed. If you are going to use the program you will be forced read in a constant and efficient manner.
• Comprehension: the program pauses for punctuation, which is supposed to increase comprehension.

Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: is split into a top and bottom panes. The text is displayed normally on the bottom and the individual words/chunks flashed on top.
• Display speed: can be controlled using the arrow buttons, enabling you to find the right pace for you.
• Display mode: you can choose between displaying individual words or "chunks" or words (which I personally prefer). In the case of the latter, you can make the chunks as big or as small as you like.
• Punctuation: you can choose whether you want the program to pause for punctuation or ignore it. Pausing is performed in a very intuitive way and presumably can increase comprehension.
• Saving sessions: is supported. Simply save and come back later to the exact point you left off.
• Formats supported: txt, html, and PDF. PDFs have to be downloaded to the desktop, but other formats can be read online. PDFs have to have extractable text (as opposed to being mainly image-based). You can also open URLs directly or even text in the clipboard.
• Customizable: in addition to tweaking the speed and mode of display, you can tweak the font/colors/background/size of text within both panes.
• Navigation: you can use hotkeys to advance/go back a word, sentence, paragraph, or page. (See Help > shortcuts for a list of these). Or you can right click on the text itself , where a number of useful context menu commands are available.
• The search function: somewhat hidden. Right click on the text to use this.
• Encoding: many encoding formats supported.

Wish list:

• Portability: a portable version would be a good thing, and probably very easy to put together.
• A "goto this line" context menu command that shifts placement to where the cursor is positioned.

The verdict: an extremely simple free program that is based on a great idea with a lot of value-added potential. If you want to read books (actually, ebooks) , and want to read them more efficiently than you have been check this one out for sure.

Version Tested: 0.99.9.

Compatibility: Windows, Linux.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 3.2 megs). For Windows download the "setup.exe" version.

If you don’t know what they are, comic-book format ebooks are typically images files that are compressed into archives and displayed in a reader according to the naming sequence of the individual images (more info on comic book formats here). Comic readers are usually geared towards displaying pages/images full screen, rotating and scrolling them for the best reading experience.

ComicRack is a worthy replacement for CDisplay, the standard bearer for comic book readers (which is also free). It goes a couple of steps further in that it is not just a display engine but includes the functionality to manage your ebook collection. Here are most notes on this program:

• Bells and whistles: there are many of these, including multiple display modes (rotate, 2-page views, etc), scroll mode, information overlays, color adjustment, automatic background matching, a magnifier tool, etc.
• The user interface: is generally nice and highly customizable, but may have just too many options and tweaks to be user friendly. Supports a tabbed, explorer-style file browser that can be placed on the left, right, or bottom of the screen (or in its own window). The type of view within the browser can be customized as well in a way reminiscent of Windows’ folder views. You can even save your workspace once you arrive at a customized layout/view combo that you like or create and save multiple workspaces. See the tips and tricks page for more info.
• PDF support: supports PDF eComics (which is to say PDFs that contain images only). However ComicRack also has the ability to read any PDF provided that you install the latest version of Ghostscript as well.
• Ebook conversions: convert any supported format to PDF, TAR, ZIP formats, or a JPEG folder. Rename the ZIP extension to CBZ or if you want CBR just compress the folder of Jpegs into a RAR archive and change the extension to CBR.
• Search function: searches your entire library using available metadata (see below).
• View multiple files: at the same time, each having its own tab on the main display.
• Metadata: ComicRack is a full-featured metadata manager, allowing you to really get in all the information that you ever care to specify about your collection (right click on any page then select info to get there). It will also allow you to search your collection’s metadata and to filter by the various properties (genre, writer, series, etc.) or use these to create smarlists.
• Ratings: right click to quickly give your ebook a 1-5 star rating as part of its metadata.
• Portability: can be used portably. From the program’s readme: “[change] the value “UseLocalSettings in ComicRack.exe.config to true … [then] copy the whole install folder to a USB stick and start it from there. All settings and the library access will now work from the USB stick”.
• Keyboard shortcuts: you can set these in the preferences section if you are keyboard-oriented.
• Sharing: multiple ComicRack installations on networked computers can share libraries (but no you cannot share your library with other users over the Internet. More info here.)

Wish list

• At times I had a feeling that less may be more (the file browser in particular seems like it has way too many functions-within-functions). This is less a criticism than a personal preference, though.
• File associations: you have to go to the settings to associate files with ComicRack. It would be helpful to be asked to make decisions on these in the installation process.

The verdict: if you have comic ebooks, ComicRack is a must download. (See this page for some resources on getting free comic ebooks).

Version Tested: 0.9.75

Compatibility: Windows 2000 or better. Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 required

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 1.97 megs); scroll to the middle of the page for the link .

Note: after I first wrote this review in January of 2008, a learned a few things about it which were not initially apparent. At a certain point (or after performing a number of conversions, or this might have been added to a newer version than the one I initially looked at), the program will require that you enter a one-off code before performing a conversion. This involves visiting a web page full of ads, solving a math problem, and getting your code. Once you input the code it will perform the PDF to DOC conversion; however, the next time you need to perform a conversion, you will have to go through the whole thing. The net effect is (a) rather annoying, and (b) this prevents you from being able to use this program offline.

However, there are free PDF to DOC conversion options. See this posting entitled How to convert PDF to Word DOC for free: a comparative test

I tested this software by converting a 20-page PDF document that contained images, charts and text into DOC format. At the end of the conversion process (which took mere seconds) the DOC file was created and opened by MS Word. Here are some observations:

• Quality: the quality was generally very good. Overall the converted document looked very similar to the original.
• Program options: you can select all pages or a subset range of pages to convert; whether to retain images and shapes in the converted document; and whether or not to use “text boxes”. Choosing “text boxes” will create multiple text boxes placed all over the document rather than a single, contiguous text (see below for more on this).
• Images: Some of the images were degraded by they were all in the general vicinity of where they were supposed to be.
• Text: the text was generally handled well. In the ’create text boxes’ scenario the converted document contained dozens of text boxes placed all around the document, which more faithfully approximated the layout and structure of the original PDF (and was more manageable when loaded into Word). Converting while the ’text boxes’ option was unchecked, however, resulted in a single block of text that did not conform as well to where the text layout of the original document. (Note: if its just simple text extraction that you want, you might want to try Text Mining Tool).
• Note on filesizes: you are likely to get DOC files that are very large in size in relation to the small size of the original PDF. For the 2.5 meg PDF file I converted I got a 73 meg DOC file.
• Support: Adobe PDF 1-1.6 formats, which, the author asserts, comprises 95% of PDF files available on the internet.
• You do not need MS Word or Adobe Acrobat installed on your machine necessarily for this program to function.

The verdict: although it performs a marginally decent freeware PDF to DOC conversion, the registration key requirement, even when “free”, is rather annoying. Moreover, depending on the kind of output that you need, you might need to invest some time manually tweaking the resulting DOC file, but the output generated by this program right off the bat is surprisingly good in its own right. For more free PDF to DOC conversion options, go here.

Version Tested: 1.1

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.07 megs).

This program doesn’t print documents into images in the manner of a virtual printer (such as PDF Creator or SWF Printer Pro). Rather, it will extract the text from an ebook and reformat it as per your settings. You can tweak all aspects of the output images, including their size (resolution), the font used, font size, orientation (e.g. flip by 90°, 270°), text color, background colors, anti-aliasing and a number of other settings. You can add also a background image if you like as well as page numbering, and you can set the number of output folders to distribute the resulting images to (useful if you would like to upload separate chunks of the ebook at a time).

To test this, I tried it out on 2 ebooks. I chose 320×240 Jpegs as the image resolution and format, which would be just right for viewing on my Iphone. (You can output to GIF and PNG if you want). The first ebook was a text file/ebook downloaded from Project Gutenberg that was a 653K text file, and the resulting folder of images was 50 megs (873 images). The second book was a 350K PDF file which ended up being 7.9 megs (107 images) when converted. (I might add that the converted text file fared considerably better in terms of text formatting than the PDF).

The bottom line is: "Ebook to Images" is a very efficient and quick solution to putting ebooks on your portable device, provided the device allows uploading and viewing images.

Version tested: 0.9.1.0

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 528K).

Rating

Version tested: 1.0

SWF Printer Pro is a virtual printer that can convert any printable document into PDF, standalone flash presentation format (SWF), as well as JPG.

There are several freeware virtual printer programs reviewed on Freewaregenius that convert printable documents into PDFs (PrimoPDF, Bullzip PDF Printer, and PDF Creator, the latter having the ability to convert to image formats as well). What’s interesting about SWF Printer Pro is that it can convert to flash format (SWF) in addition to PDF and JPG’s. Here are some notes on this program:

• Converts anything you can print: installs as a virtual printer, and if your document allows for printing then it can be converted no matter what format it is.
• SWF navigation: you can either set a time period for transitioning the SWF flash file from one page to the next that will apply to all pages (no, you cannot set it for each page individually) or choose to wait for user input before going to the next page. In this case SWF Printer Pro provides a number of pre-set navigation buttons to choose from, and will allow you to customize the placement of these on the page.
• SWF options: you can set the size and margin of the SWF presentation, set background color for transparent areas. Other options: whether or not to set ’full screen mode’, whether or not to allow scaling/enable right click menu/allow keyboard navigation. You can even choose an audio file (MP3 or WAV) to use as background soundtrack. For some reason the resulting SWF files that I generated lacked the .SWF extension in the file names, but worked great once I added that manually into the filename.
• PDF options: include meta info for the document (author, keywords, descriptions, etc.), security options (permissions, protection strength), master and user level password protection. A handful of other options as well such as margins, orientation, etc.
• Print to JPG: generates a separate JPG file for each page in your document. Surprisingly, no options available in this case; by default it generates large hi-res Jpegs that you can subsequently reduce in size if you need to.
• Freeware: not just for personal use but, interestingly, business use as well. I am guessing that there used to be two versions of this program (SWF Printer and SWF Printer Pro) but that at this point the developers are offering the Pro version for free.
• Silent mode: is a mode whereby you can print straight into your default options without having to go through the options menus every time. Unfortunately, setting this up requires manually going in and changing the registry, which I found rather strange (instructions here). On the other hand this option is (apparently) geared towards developers and isn’t something most user would want anyway.

Wish list:

• Different Quality settings: would have been great, especially if they also displayed a preview of the predicted size of the generated file(s). As it is the different DPI quality settings that can be changed from the printing preferences strangely do not seem to have any effect on the quality or size of the generated files.

The verdict: the fact that this program does all three of PDFs, JPGs and SWF sends it high up on my list of must-install programs (it does a great job with all 3 formats.) It is the only freeware virtual printer that I know of that does SWF. If you work with SWF files especially or you want to create SWF files from all manner of source documents then this program is for you.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, VISTA.

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 1.76 megs).

Rating

Version tested: 1.1.42

Text Mining Tool is a free program that can extract text from PDF, DOC, RTF, CHM and HTML files without needing to have any other installed programs that open these files such as MS Word or a PDF reader.

If you ever need to extract text out of any of the above mentioned file formats you can use Text Mining Tool to do so quickly and easily. All you have to do is load the source file and it will extract the text and display it for you, afterwhich you can either save the text file or copy it into the clipboard.

Of course, you can always use a free program such as OpenOffice to open and edit a number of these formats, and many PDF readers allow you to select text from the PDF file and copy it into the clipboard. However, if you don’t want to install any programs or have to open these programs and then manually go through the process of grabbing the text, Text Mining Tool can do it all for you in a single click.

The only issue I have encountered with this program is that when I tried to extract text from a .CHM file it did not work, and I got an error message instead. I am assuming that this error will be fixed in future versions of this program. Here are some other notes:

• Hotkeys: all functions can be performed using hotkeys (open/save/copy to clipboard).
• Portable: no install necessary, simply extract and run.
• CLI tool: entitled minetext is included for use from the command line interface.

Text Mining Toolis a nice, simple tool that supports a good range of file types and is 100% free. If you need to extract text from files you will really appreciate this one.

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 8 megs).

Rating

Version tested: 1.0 build 0017

PDF-XChange Viewer is a free PDF viewer and editor that offers a number of useful functions including form filling, typewriter mode (for forms that were not designed for filling), the ability to add annotations and draw shapes into your PDF, as well as the ability to leave comments and embed sticky notes into the PDF document.

Alternatives to Adobe’s free PDF reader were traditionally borne out of a need to have a lean, fast-loading PDF viewing app; PDF-XChange certainly delivers on this, but it also manages to pack a large number of useful functions. Here are some notes on this program:

As a viewer: in addition to the usual viewing tools (e.g. zooming, searching text, highlighting form feeds), PDF-XChange offers Firefox style tabbed browsing, viewing all open docs as thumbnails, and bookmarking pages. The ’pan and zoom’ tool proved to be a surprisingly practical (and pleasant) navigation aide. The side pane on the left hand margin can optionally display thumbnails of individual pages of the document (it can also display bookmarked pages). Compatible with PDF documents versions 1.0 and higher.

As an editor: this is where most of the interesting features are, as follows:

• Manipulate pages: rotate your document clockwise or counterclockwise with the press of a button (a handy way to transform your document from portrait to landscape or vice versa if you wanted to). You can also delete pages and, although I wasn’t able to do it, there is an option for cropping pages (to be implemented in a future version, perhaps?).
• Form filling: fill forms easily with the form filling tool (provided the pdf document is designed form). Works really well but provides no formatting options beyond basic text (i.e. you cannot choose bold or underlined or different sized fonts).
• Typewriter tool: gives you the ability to quickly and easily overlay text on any part of the document. Especially handy when filling out a form that is not actually a PDF form. (This function alone makes this program a cut above the rest in my opinion).
• Add comments: PDF-XChange allows you to leave a comment anywhere on the document. This will typically look like a colored icon with a sticky note attached to it or hovering nearby; otherwise you can highlight a bunch of text and link it to a balloon hovering close to it (see screenshot). I made comments on a test document and found that although the actual comment will NOT be visible on the page once you print it, I was surprised that the icon denoting the location of the comment in fact did print. You can also underline or strike out text anywhere on the document (and yes this will be printed).
• Add objects: including text boxes (with extensive text formatting options), callout boxes, and various shapes such as lines/arrows, rectangles, etc. and even free-form drawing. All objects are editable in terms of border, thickness, color, fill color, etc.
• Stamps: useful for, say, adding your signature in electronic format and ’stamping’ it in the correct location as needed. This option did not work, unfortunately; I’m guessing this function relegated for future versions.
• Export to images: straight into a number of formats including BMP, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG.
• Snapshot tool: allows you to capture any part of the pdf that is displayed on screen into the clipboard as an image in order to paste into another application.

My wish list: there are a number of things that would make this program significantly better

• The ability to ’flatten’ objects and typewriter text that is added to a pdf such that it is preserved when the document is opened in other readers such as Adobe or Foxit. Currently, only the form-filled text and the comments created with PDF-XChange Viewer are preserved when opening the same document with Adobe Reader or Foxit. Ironically I’ve been using the Primo pdf printer to do this before publishing my PDF’s.
• Better Undo: I mistakenly underlined all text in a page using the ’underline text tool’ and found that I could not undo. In fact, I could not for the life of me figure out how to remove the underlining, and opted to close and re-load instead.
• Another icon please: for all of its presumed slickness, this program features a gaudy and unattractive PDF icon to. Here’s hoping they will change it.

The verdict: Contains a plethora of useful editing features compared to Foxit (which only does form filling). PDF-XChange Viewer still feels like it needs kinks ironed out but it easily my favorite PDF reader; I highly recommend it.

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 13 megs). Also visit the program home page.

Version tested: 2.3.5

PDFTK Builder (a GUI for PDFTK) can merge, split, decrypt, encrypt and insert a watermark image into PDF documents.

This is a small, simple to use program that does performs the above-mentioned PDF editing operations really well.

• Merging PDF documents: you can add PDF’s singly or in batches. For each document you can specify exactly which pages you want to include (e.g. “1,3,5-10″ will include pages 1,3 and 5 through 10). You can merge landscape and portrait formatted pages within the same document. Note that you can use this same command to split a PDF into distinct chunks; for example, to split a 10-page PDF into 2 parts, select the document , choose page range 1-5, and run. Repeat for pages 6-10 and you’re done.
• Splitting a PDF document: this create a single PDF file for each page in the original document. Simply Point PDFTK Builder to your document, press ’Save’; note that all the new documents will be automatically placed in the same directory as the original file, so you might want to place the original file in the appropriate directory before you run.
• Watermarking/Inserting an image into the background: strangely, this will require a PDF as input for the image that you would want to use rather than an image file. Also, it does not offer any manipulation options for your image such as control over its transparency, size, or color. You will need to (a) manipulate your image outside of PDFTK Builder so its just the way you want it, and (b) convert it to PDF (this you can do easily using virtual PDF printer programs like PrimoPDF or PDFCreator).
• Decrypt a PDF: unfortunately, this requires that you have the original password for opening before it decrypts, which as far as I am concerned makes it completely useless. If you need this function I recommend you use other freeware programs that can decrypt a PDF without the need for a password (Freeware PDF Unlocker, GUI for PDFTK the latter being faster and more powerful).
• Encrypt a PDF: quite a number of options here, including allowing/disallowing printing, degraded printing, password for opening the PDF, and other options (see screenshot). You can also set an owner and user passwords. I tested a document encrypted with PDFTK Builder to see if any of the decrypting programs mentioned above can remove the encryption; they did not.

Although for this kind of program PDFTK Builder is a bit bare bones, that’s almost a strength not a weakness. The main function of merging/extracting pages from PDF documents is very nicely implemented and intuitive. I will say that the watermarking function could have been better implemented though with more options. There is another similar program out there (the aforementioned GUI for PDFTK) that has a larger range of functions but a confusing interface; I chose to review PDFTK Builder instead because (a) it does the job really well, even when it doesn’t have too many esoteric functions, and (b) it has a nice, user-friendly interface design. The only reason I didn’t give this 5 stars is the way decryption is implemented.

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to get the latest version (Full installtion approx 1.88 megs; includes the necessary PDFTK as well). Scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Version tested: 2.0.003 Beta

Schmap Guides are fully interactive travel guides that cover a myriad of cities across Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These freely-downloadable travel guides are available for dozens of cities and contain detailed, beautifully presented maps and photos. They also contain searchable information for the relevant city including its history, neighborhoods, entertainment, cultural offering and sites. Schmap guides provide their own offline content as well as numerous relevant online links (for example to Google maps, weather resources, Wikipedia, etc.)

Right off the bat I want to say that, even if you’re not travelling, make sure that you absolutely check out the Schmap city guide for the city that you live in (or close to) if it is available. Click here for a current list. These guides are jam-packed with interactive information that is very well presented and fun to interact with, and are a great way to explore a city. Note that there are themed packs that cover subjects like ’Romantic Getaways’, ’’The Great Outdoors’, etc. that you can download as well.

The info: the one thing which struck me immediately is the range and breadth of the information available within each Schmap guide. This ranges from the prerequisite historical and neighborhood information to detailed information about each location and event that includes picture(s), contact info (telephone, address, email, and URL), as well as an informative essay review – for each and every listed place or event! The sheer breadth of the information is one of the main underlying strengths of these guides.

The user interface: Generally speaking, the Schmap player (which plays all of the Schmap city guides) consists of a main information area in the middle with two columns of controls and/or related information on the right and left margins. The main display will either show a tabbed text area that contains all the essay and/or directory listings, or otherwise will display a map. Schmap maps are extremely easy to navigate, either by ’grabbing’ hold of the map and moving in the desired direction or using navigational arrows. Zooming in and out is done using the on-screen sliders or other controls (for example, a ’selection tool’ can be used to select a sub-set of the visible map, causing it to zoom into a higher level of detail)..

Map layers: ’layers’ are categories of events or places that can appear on a map, so for example nightclubs, hotels, or “sights and attractions” are layers that can be switched on or off so that they will appear or not appear on the map. It is a way to remove clutter from the map and just see what you want; so, therefore, you might view a certain neighborhood or part of the city and enable the layer for “restaurants and cafes”, upon which all of the restaurants and cafes within your visible map will appear as colored dots with distinctive icons. What is cool is that there are 3 levels of layers, so, for example, you do not need to activate the entire “restaurants and cafes” layer but instead just activate “Mexican restaurants” if that is the kind of restaurant you are looking for, or you can drill down further and just light up the individual Mexican restaurant(s) you want. At any one point your layers will be active only for that part of the map you are interested in.

Mousing over the icons on the map will instantly show a wealth of information on the these, including pictures and an essay review. When you find events and places that you like or are interested in, you can bookmark these for easy access or for playback within a virtual tour (see below).

The Player: the player is the main innovation that Schmap guides brings to the table. It looks like a normal media player with play, pause, back, and forward buttons. What it does is zoom in and out of the map, presenting a slideshow of places or events sequentially and with brief pauses in between. This may not seem like much but somehow it works and ends up being a very effective and entertaining way to explore the city or sub-section of the map you’re interested in. Each Schmap guide comes pre-loaded with suggested custom “tours” which you should really check out.

Tours: these are simply a list of places or events that the player will scroll through in sequence. Each guide comes pre-loaded with tours, which could either be general tours of the city’s most well known landmarks, best nightlife, best restaurants, etc. These are really fun and informative and surprisingly satisfying.

How to use the player: you can (a) select the part of the map that you are interested in, (b) selected the types of layer (places and events) you are interested in, and then (c) press the play button. The player will scroll through all the relevant places/events. Somehow, it really works effectively in giving you a very good idea about what your options are within the geographic placement you are interested in. A great way to (virtually) explore a neighborhood.

Search: everything is searchable, but what is interesting is that (a) you can limit your search to the selected geographic area, and (b) you can search online resources, strictly for that geographic area. For example, you can select a section of Seattle and search for ’Asian Art’, then decide to search Google maps as well. Your search on Google maps will be limited to exactly that part of Seattle you have selected in your map. Very cool indeed

Limitations (and how this product can be improved): these guides predictably have a central focus and the further into the outlying areas you go the less information is available, which is understandable. One curious omission is interactive bus routes/metro maps, or even the ability to set 2 points on a map and search (externally on the internet) for the best directions to and from these. Currently you can pinpoint a location and search for directions to it on Google maps, but only the destination info is populated and you have to enter the origin manually in the Google maps UI. And while I know this is still in beta, there seemed to be right-click context menus when navigating maps that simply did not work on my computer, but did work a few times such that I was aware they were there. Oh, and I really wish there were more cities covered in more regions of the world.

The Verdict: an amazing product that manages to be much more than an interactive ebook with links – and free. I highly recommend it whether you are researching a travel destination or want to explore the city that you live in. Either way, you will find it informative and entertaining.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP (doesn’t say if compatible with Vista). PIII 800Mhx processor or faster, 50MB hard drive space.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (the player approx 1.63 Megs; city guides downloadable separately).