The company that had the most to lose from Microsoft adding PDF functionality to Office stays the course, releasing PDF Converter, PDF Converter Pro, and PDF Create 4.0.If the powers that be at Nuance (formerly ScanSoft) were rattled by the fact that Microsoft was planning to cannibalize some of the functionality of the company's PDF Converter Pro utility, they didn't show it.
First, Microsoft announced it would add PDF creation functions to all shipping copies of the upcoming release of Office. Then, Adobe put its legal department on the case, giving Microsoft—in this case a third-party PDF software developer along with Nuance and every little garage software company cranking out boutique plug-ins—a little special attention. Supposedly, Microsoft agreed to offer PDF creation in Office as a free download, and clouded future of Microsoft's own PDF-like XPS format to appease Adobe.
Nuance paid no mind, plowing full speed ahead in developing version 4 of all three utilities: PDF Converter ($49.99), which takes PDFs and turns them into Office files; PDF Create ($49.99), which turns Office files into PDF; and PDF Converter Professional ($99.99), which combines the functionality of the two. PDF Converter Pro has special features catering to Office and Corel WordPerfect, but its PDF-creation features are accessible from any Windows app with a "print" command.
While there are many different PDF creation and conversion utilities out there, it can be argued that the Nuance products have the deepest penetration of them all in the general office market—save Adobe Acrobat itself—with its low price and wide retail distribution.
Chris Strammiello, Nuance director of product marketing, says that pretty much anything Microsoft does in-house with PDF helps Nuance: If Redmond offers basic PDF functionality with Office, it will proliferate PDF usage in the office and drive demand for Nuance utilities, which offer deeper features such as email optimization, stamping, digital signatures, merging multiple documents into one PDFs, and optical character recognition (OCR) that makes scanned text documents into searchable PDFs.
If the opposite happens and Adobe's legal eagles scare Microsoft away from PDF entirely, well, that leaves one monstrous competitor off the market.
"We knew about Microsoft PDF a long, long time ago—we're gold partners with Microsoft, we met with them and talked about it. Our feeling was that Microsoft was offering a limited implementation of PDF 1.4, that it's only going to be created out of their Office applications, and that this is going to be a good thing for the market," Strammiello says. "A lot of simple PDF creation is going to ...seed the market for those of us who offer more fully featured PDF [software]."
PDF Converter Pro 4, he says, improves the speed of processes such as PDF-to-Word conversion over version 3. Nuance realized that, while a lot of users might not notice conversion improvements because they're doing one- or two-page documents, people who convert longer documents—especially in the legal field, many of whom also need Converter's native WordPerfect export developed in collaboration with Corel—needed an efficiency boost. The speed of opening documents and opening the application itself improved 50% to 300%, according to Nuance benchmarks.
Nuance also says that the new version improves accuracy of layout and text attributes from PDF to Office and back to PDF. A new function can take tables and export them to Excel: It offers a choice of converting multiple tables into a single Excel worksheet or create an entire workbook with separate worksheets for each chart.
Converter Pro 4 adds PDF/A support for document archiving, which Strammiello says is a priority for government users of the utility—and a significant contributor to the expansion of PDF in the office environment, in addition to Apple adding PDF creation as a system-level feature of its operating system.
"With Microsoft's efforts, Apple's advertising, and PDF/A [becoming] an ISO standard, we think there's significant growth in the PDF market ahead of us," he adds.
Features like these as well as PDF forms conversion, Strammiello says, makes Nuance's inexpensive (relative to Acrobat Standard and Pro) PDF tools more robust than what Microsoft was planning, and more attuned to the office user's needs than the other PDF tools on the market.
Perhaps the most intriguing new feature to make its way into PDF Converter Pro 4 is PDF-to-Audio, which "reads" PDFs in audio format using RealSpeak, another Nuance technology. It allows users to turn their documents into audio files that can be used for a number of applications, including customizing content for visually impaired readers, playing documents on a car CD player while commuting, or creating Podcasts of press releases or other content.
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