Category: PDF conversion utilities

Product: PDF-XChange 3 Pro Version

Company: Tracker Software Products Ltd.

Web Site: www.docu-track.com

Price: $69.50 direct (single user license)

Bag of PDF Tricks

PDF-XChange 3 Pro from Tracker Software Products is actually a collection of products. While it is a bit uneven around some of the edges, it is a competent and versatile bundle of PDF creation and manipulation tools. The product is available for download from the company Web site at www.docu-track.com, starting at $69 for a single-user license; quantity licenses are available as well, including a worldwide unlimited license for $8,999. More limited versions are also available, including a “light” edition with fewer options that may be more suitable for novice users.

The key component of the package is the PDF-XChange 3.0 print driver, which installs as a Windows printer so that you can print directly from any Windows application to a PDF file. The driver has a wide range of sophisticated PDF support features, giving you a great deal of control over the files you create.

The printer driver settings window has a column of categories down the left side of the window, while the remainder of the window gives you configuration choices. For example, the first setting is Paper, where you can choose among standard American and European paper sizes, as well as custom sizes. You can choose between portrait or landscape orientation. You also control the dots per inch (dpi) for the output, scaling, and choose to format multiple pages per sheet, from 1 to 16.

The other categories provide a wide range of controls. The General section lets you choose which level of Adobe Acrobat compatibility you want — Acrobat 3 and 4, 5, or 6 and above — and whether to preserve compatibility with earlier versions. You can also choose the configuration of the viewer program when it opens with the file, such as single-page layout, or whether thumbnails are displayed or not.

Another setting category lets you control the amount of compression used on a file, with separate settings for high color/grayscale images, indexed color images, and monochrome images. You can choose which fonts, if any, to embed in the document. You can define and add watermarks to the document pages, using your choice of image or text, font, formatting, rotation, opacity, placement, and size. Security features let you set separate passwords for opening and modifying the PDF file, and restrict usage such as preventing printing, copying, or changing the content.

You can set the driver to automatically identify Web page URLs in the document, and format them automatically to your specifications. You can have the driver automatically identify Bookmarks from the source document, parsing based on formatting features such as font, bold, point size, or color, or a combination of them. You can define multiple levels of matching criteria to create an outline of bookmarks. You can also just leave it to PDF-XChange 3 Pro to identify your document structure on its own, and choose the bookmarks on its own. The driver also lets you automatically email the PDF file as an attachment or a ZIP archive, adjust optimization settings, and set up the default saving instructions.

All these settings are daunting to novice users, but provide essential control to advanced users. It can be tedious to go back and make a number of changes to these settings each time you have a different type of job, however, but there’s a feature for that, too. Once you have the settings the way you want them, you can save them as a Profile that you can later recall when you want to use the same settings.

PDF-XChange 3 Pro did an excellent job of converting some documents with complex formatting, including multiple columns and a variety of fonts and effects. Note that font embedding is turned off by default, so if the fonts in the final result do not match the original, it may be because the fonts were not embedded.

The print driver alone would arguably be worth the license fee, but there’s more in the package. One of the most attractive features is the Office2PDF utility. This program lets you assemble a series of Microsoft Word, Excel, or Internet Explorer files, and then process them as a batch to create individual PDF files. You can also define a folder to be watched; new files saved to this folder will be added to the job list for processing in the next batch. Office2PDF uses the PDF-XChange 3.0 print driver, so you have all the controls and features available when creating a batch of files as you do when you create them one at a time.

The PDFSaver utility lets you assemble new PDF documents from pieces of other files. By enabling this feature in the print driver, print jobs are held as temporary files. For example, you might print a sequence of pages from a Word document, and some slides from a PowerPoint presentation. You can then use the program to sequence them, and create a single PDF file.

The bundle also includes PDF ToolBox, which also performs a range of useful tasks. Unlike the very graphical and interactive interface of the other programs, the PDF ToolBox interface is more primitive. You need to know what you want before you start in most cases, as you won’t be able to see what you’re working with in many cases.

For example, the Extract Pages from a File can create a new document by “pulling” pages from an existing PDF file. You list the pages that you want to extract to the new document, and they are copied from the original. (The original file is not changed in the process.) Another utility lets you merge files to create a single document. With these two features alone, you can assemble new PDF files from a collection of other files, which can be useful when you only want to send a few pages out of longer documents.

The program also has utilities to edit or add bookmarks to a PDF, add thumbnails, extract images, and add watermarks. You can crop and rotate pages in a PDF. You can extract text from a PDF which is then saved in a separate text file. You can also scan a document from any WIA or TWAIN compatible scanner or other device and save it as a PDF file. There is also a send function that lets you send one file or a collection to one or more email addresses using either your existing mail client or by communicating directly with an email, Web site, or FTP server.

The PDF ToolBox has a disjointed feel about it, as each function exists as its own choice on the main window. The different functions have some distinct weaknesses. For example, the text extraction feature does not handle multi-column format documents correctly; it runs the lines together. On the cropping feature, you don’t see the document you are modifying, so you have to have some other way to refer to the layout so you know where to crop. A visual, interactive control would be much more effective. According to a company representative, a new version of PDF ToolBox is under development, and is slated to have a better interface that will make it easier to use.

Fortunately, the value of PDF-XChange 3 Pro does not lean heavily on PDF ToolBox. The other programs are much smoother and polished, and the PDF-XChange 3.0 driver alone will justify the cost for many users. It provides a level of control that goes beyond what many users will need to start with, so they are not likely to outgrow it as they become more demanding. The batch procession features and PDFSaver that lets you assemble one file from parts of many are also helpful.