PDF Converter Professional 7.0 is one of several otherwise excellent software packages from Nuance that are let down by the company's draconian approach to software theft.
Like Microsoft and Adobe, Nuance uses an activation process. This is not unreasonable, but, unlike these two, Nuance has a very flaky implementation, prompting me to knock a star off the rating.
The software itself is fine - indeed, it is streets ahead of Acrobat, especially on cost - but after using it for some months it suddenly decided that I had pirated the thing and had installed it on another computer. Nope. I had just added some external drives. The software then interpreted this as a different computer. Even Windows doesn't do that. Adobe fixed similar issues some years ago.
This is by design, according to Nuance's support staff, which told me that "changing parts of the computer will trigger to change the machine finger print and changing the machine finger print will require activation. Using an external hard drive is included on the parts of the computer which change the machine finger print. We apologized but that how our activation works."
This is not how other "activated" software works.
You have to be careful with this activation process. Do it too often - easily done if you turn external drives on and off - and you are deemed to be a software thief and you are locked out of the software that you have paid for.
If you are choosing between different PDF options, you might want to see if the alternative has a more sane approach to activation.
This warning applies to other Nuance packages because they suffer from the same disease. I have had it on OmniPage Professional 17 and Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 11, others have been hit on PaperPort Professional V12.0. It would make me think twice about buying future versions.
Update: the latest thing to provoke an activation request in PDF Converter 7 was a BIOS update on my computer. Nuance tells me that this is correct. BIOS updates change the machine's fingerprint, so activation is required. Funnily, neither Microsoft nor Adobe see this change as serious enough to warrant reactivation of Acrobat or Windows. PDF Converter PRO 7.0 Retail
Except for one critical problem, this is an excellent alternative to Adobe Acrobat and seems to integrate well with that program when sharing comments and editing etc etc.
I would recommend it highly except for a fundamental problem with the way this software is activated and the likelihood that it will stop working due to this feature. PDF Converter Professional 7 seems to identify the process of adding/removing external drives as significantly changing the computer and flags this as the user installing the software on a new computer. It then asks for activation, which would not be a big deal except that there are a very limited number of activations available to the user before the software stops working.
I phoned the help line and was told to reinstall the program with antivirus and firewall turned off, which was done, but the problem continued.
I phoned again and was told to not only do a clean install but to register the software online. Registration is separate to activation and requires personal information that I am not particularly happy giving to a commercial company, but in this case I did. The software continued to ask for activation after external drives were used.
External drives are commonly needed to back up data files and transfer large video files, so it appears that this software will fairly quickly become unusable for many people who need to use external drives.
I use other much more expensive software that requires activation, but does not have this problem. I am returning this software for a refund.
This Nuance product (you can add/delete/edit fields) is similar to the Adobe Acrobat 7 that I used to use with Windows XP, but which predates Windows 7. I used the Nuance product to convert a .pdf to a .doc file, and I was amazed that the bullets were real bullets and the .doc looked exactly like the .pdf. I had tried that a few years ago with PaperPort, TextBridge, OmniPage or some software that did a terrible job, and it could not even keep the fonts consistent, with random italics and splitting up paragraphs. It did this great job with a .pdf created from a Word document. I have noticed some inconsistencies in Converter Pro 7 with scanned documents but not .pdfs created directly from Word.
I used the "FormTyper" command to create a fillable PDF from non-fillable PDF file. It created a fillable text area above each line to be filled in on the form. It used a default text size that was comparable to the size of the other text on the document. There was no box around the text field and no visible, printing underline. The only line it missed was a 2-character underline on a form -- it was too short. It will create a field if there is a horizontal line going margin-to-margin across your page, but those are easy enough to delete. On check box lists it was able to replace the form's box with a pdf check box.
Another useful feature is the ability to manually select the order of fields when tabbing through a document. Each field will show it's order onscreen, and you can double-click on the one you want to be first and single-click on the rest. It automatically renumbers the subsequent fields. From what I recall from Acrobat 7, you could select a top-to-bottom or left-to-right, but not individual field order.
Hints:
Try this in the pull-down menus: Edit > Preferences > General > Scanner setup > deselect "Display scanner dialog box" and choose your default options. Next time you scan, the program skips Microsoft's scan options dialog box and uses your settings. This saves me a lot of time and frustration.
In Microsoft Word (and probably other programs), if you print your document using the pull down menu created by Converter Pro 7, the program will create your document's table of contents with actual links to the pages in the pdf. If you simply use Microsoft's print command and select either Docucom PDF Driver or ScanSoft PDF Create (the two printers that Converter Pro 7 installs), then you get a simple .pdf without the indexing/linking. This assumes that you are an advanced Word user who is able to create a table of contents using Word's styles/headings feature.
Bugs:
It will not let you use Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins for copy and paste, and you get a tilde "~" character instead of the copied text string. You have to use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V instead, or right click menu to copy and paste. Also if you start to type information in a field and it matches previously-typed info, a box pops up and lets you select the entire prior-used strings whose initial characters match what you are typing. It's a little tricky to type in what you want if you don't want to use the prior-used string, because tab or enter sometimes selects the first recommended prior string to complete what you were typing, and you only wanted what you typed in the field. You can turn off auto-complete in the Edit > Preferences > Forms menu.
After several months of use, one day I noticed my computer running very slow. I checked Windows's Task Manager, and program called PdfPro7Hook.exe was using 50% of the CPU. Then when I started the PDF Converter Pro 7 main program, another instance of PdfPro7Hook.exe started, and you guessed it, the 2 instances were using 100% of the CPU and the computer locked up. The Nuance technical support punk told me to manually end the program in Task Manager. Someone who was not as familiar with computers as me may have ended the call there, but I knew better. Sure, like I wanted to do that every time I started my computer, because when you install the main program, PdfPro7Hook.exe always runs in the background, even though it is not in the Startup folder. Then the punk refused to help because I run Windows on a Mac. Troubleshooting on my own, I noticed that if I ended the PdfPro7Hook.exe process in Task Manager and manually double-clicked on the PdfPro7Hook.exe program icon, PdfPro7Hook.exe would run with 0% CPU being used. PdfPro7Hook.exe is used to verify that you have a legitimate copy of the main program, and if it is not running, the main program will leave a watermark on your .pdfs that you are using an evaluation version of the software. I placed a shortcut in the Startup folder, and when I restarted my computer I had 2 instances of PdfPro7Hook.exe running, one at 50% and the other at 0%. My work-around was to move PdfPro7Hook.exe up one directory, into the "Nuance" folder under Program Files(x86) folder, and place a shortcut to PdfPro7Hook.exe at its new location in my Startup folder in the Start Menu. Now only one instance of PdfPro7Hook.exe runs at a time, it starts automatically when I start my computer, and uses 0% CPU.
Bonus program:
I got a free copy of PaperPort 12 from Nuance's website with ordering PDF Converter 7 Professional. But I don't know if I'm going to install PaperPort, because I have never seen a product matrix to tell me that it does anything that PDF Converter 7 Pro cannot do.
Why I chose this over Adobe:
I decided to pick this up since I could not install Adobe Reader on my Win7 system. I have an Apple Mac mini running Windows 7 under Boot Camp. After buying and using the Nuance software, I decided to try to install the Adobe Reader anyway, because I was still within Window's free phone support period, just in case I had a similar problem with another piece of software in the future. Windows support did try to help me with the install problem, and later scheduled a joint phone call with Adobe, but Adobe refused to support their free reader and told Microsoft that I should buy one of their products if I want support, so the joint phone call never happened. - Pdf Editor - Pdf - Pdf Conversion - Pdf Reader'
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