Tuesday, Nuance announced version 5 upgrades to its popular PDF Converter, PDF Create, PDF Converter Pro, and introduced a new server product called PDF Converter Pro Enterprise Edition. The company says the new editions sport faster PDF creation and conversion rates, as well as offer greater handling capabilities for XPS, Microsoft's fledgling PDF-like electronic document format.

"We've taken great strides to ensure that the user experience is tailored for the business user," says Michael Angelo, Nuance senior product manager. "Beyond that, we've tailored extremely aggressive site-license programs tailored to deliver PDF to every desktop within the enterprise...we've actually had situations where we're replacing Acrobat in a company for less than what they're paying Adobe for maintenance."

While the previous versions of some Nuance tools dabbled in XPS, Angelo says, PDF Converter Pro 5 is the first that can change XPS files to PDF and vice-versa. The company has begun to see some call for XPS in the marketplace, especially in the healthcare market. That vertical, Angelo says, probably likes XPS because their many back-end systems are built on Microsoft—and XPS comes free with it.

"People are touting XPS as a competitor to PDF," says Angelo, who adds that Converter also can output PDFs to new Microsoft Office file formats such as Word's ".docx". "We actually think it's going to co-exist with PDF for awhile—we're not sure where the future's going to lead us, but we're in the unique position to support both."

New to PDF Converter Pro are several tools that make document collaboration more efficient—including a split-screen view in which two versions of a PDF can be compared. Enhanced split-and-merge capabilities also make it simpler to chop a long PDF into more manageable pieces, or group them together in one file.

Furthermore, Angelo says, Nuance added more email capabilities to PDF Converter, as the company discovered its users are archiving documents, graphics, and emails related to a project in one PDF—instead of letting them lie them in discrete locations on a server or hard drive after the project's done.

Beyond being able to open and convert EPS and PostScript files into PDF and other formats, Nuance's apps don't have any of the prepress capabilities found in Acrobat—and therefore don't support the many and varied PDF/X standards out there for printing. PDF Converter does, however, support the PDF/A archiving standard, which Angelo says is becoming increasingly important among Nuance's customers in the legal, government, and educational vertical markets.

Another interesting twist Nuance—which also owns the speech-recognition and synthesis tools originally developed by Dragon—brings to the PDF table is a robust set of "read aloud" tools that can port PDFs to MP3. Not only do visually impaired users find the tools effective, Angelo says, but Nuance is finding that users in the legal market are putting documents on their iPods or burning them to CD and listening to them during their commutes in order to squeeze a little work out of otherwise dead time.

Angelo—who probably speaks for all third-party developers of PDF support applications and Acrobat plug-ins—says that Nuance is pleased Adobe has pushed had for approval of PDF 1.7 as an ISO standard. That action, he says, shows Adobe is serious about keeping PDF an open standard and establishing it as the premier electronic document format. At the same time, he says, it "sort of fends off" competition from PDF alternatives including XPS.

"Having the ISO standard out there is going to be fantastic," Angelo says, noting that even though PDF has been around for years and is well-established, ISO approval can make it more popular than ever. "PDF creation is becoming more ubiquitous...It seems, even after all this time, PDF's really getting a shot in the arm."