Sometimes there's no magic bullet application to solve your PDF management tasks. So break out the tool box and use multiple applications to divvy up the tasks into smaller components.
For Jack Kern, PDFs have become a vital part of how his company presents its research, but that doesn't mean they do everything he wants.
As director of research at Colorado-based Archstone-Smith Trust, Kern has been looking for ways to capture and disseminate information to the organization's investment, operations and executive teams. Kern found a solution in PDFs, which give Archstone-Smith the ability to maintain a research portal with information that's consistent and easy to use.
But recent experiments in making the PDFs more useful have left Kern somewhat frustrated. The organization is in different parts of the world, and Kern has been searching for a tool that will translate German to English in PDFs, and do the translations in batch format.
Also, he's finding that it takes time to make the number of PDFs that he needs, leading Kern to wonder if there's a way to batch PDFs so he can convert a number of Word and Excel files into PDF while preserving the same file name.
"Since we process so much information and convert it to PDFs, we were looking for a very comprehensive and sophisticated way of developing a batch process that would allow flexibility in file naming conventions as well as updates," he said.
Filling the Toolkit
Unfortunately, despite intense Google sessions and pleas to PDF experts from California to Hamburg in order to find solutions to Kern's problems, there seems to be no single tool that can do both translation work and automated batch conversion. There are, however, some tools that can tackle at least a portion of the job needed by Kern, and if combined, could give him everything he needs.
First, the trickiest problem seems to be in the German to English translation. Several PDF utility makers agree that the process will likely be about as far from automation as you can get. Simply put, to translate text within a PDF document, a company would have to convert the PDF to another format like TXT, RTF or DOC, and then use a translation tool for the text.
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An example of this kind of tool is Business Translator, from HunterSoft. The application translates document and Web pages and provides access to 12 online dictionaries for the task. It handles English and German, as well as many other European languages and Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
Once the text is translated, it has to be turned back into a PDF by a conversion tool, possibly the same one that was able to flip it from PDF into another format. These type of applications can be found in the low-cost and freeware arenas, and include applications like Bee Documents' Text to PDF Converter 2.1 for Mac OS X systems, or PDF2Any from GetPDF Inc. for Windows systems.
For the second question, automated batching can be done with a tool like PDF4U Pro + Batch Converter, from PDF Bean Inc. According to Pierre-Henry de Latour of AcroPDF Systems, the tool is capable of batch converting "a bunch" of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, RTF, and even AutoCAD drawings to PDF while preserving the same file name with the extension changed to .pdf. Other options for Windows systems are PDF reDirect Pro, or Batch Converter from PDF4free.
For Mac OS X systems, Danny Espinoza of Mesa Dynamics recommends the text to PDF converter from Bee Documents. If a company like Kern's is already using the tool to do translation work, it makes sense to have it tackle the batch job as well. Espinoza notes that text-to-PDF tools are rare for OS X because the operating system has the ability to convert any document to PDF, although not in a batch.
As Kern and nearly every other computer user has found, simply having a need doesn't mean there's a single tool for it, sadly. But sometimes just a few applications together can do the work, as long as there's a bit of human elbow grease in the mix as well.
Document Management 
