The Portable Document Format, invented by Adobe, is now so ubiquitous that there's an ISO standard for it standalone PDF-creation program is Adobe Acrobat, but coming up fast is Nuance's PDF Converter Professional, just released in Version 4.
It automatically adds extra tool bars to many popular office programs, such as Word, Outlook, Excel and WordPerfect. PDF files can then be created from any open document. An existing PDF file can also be loaded into PDF Converter 4 Professional and converted directly into an editable Word, Excel or WordPerfect document.

In this version, Nuance has reworked its two Assistants - one for PDF creation and the other for conversion - and improved their interfaces.

Two new file formats are supported;the 1.6 version of Adobe's PDF standard and the new PDF/A standard for archival documents.
While working on new formats, Nuance has improved PDF-generation
with a new optimiser to reduce file sizes.To test this, we took an 844K Word file with embedded colour photos and tables and made PDFs using PDF Converter 4.The resulting file was 753K,so PDF Converter 4 wir on that one.

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The program can read a PDF file tc you using ReaISpeak,Nuance's text to-speech technology.This could be useful for visually impaired owners.

Improvements in PDF Converter L Professional are mostly evolutionarj but they still make it a better produc The viewer and editor interfaces are compatible and styled forVistaWhc should be remembered, though, is that PDF Converter 4 Professional is half the price of Acrobat.