ScanSoft's PDF Converter isn't the Holy Grail. It's not quite the magic bullet that makes PDFs editable in Microsoft Word.ScanSoft's PDF Converter isn't the Holy Grail. It's not quite the magic bullet that makes PDFs editable in Microsoft Word.
But for Office users who desperately need to get content out of PDFs and either can't afford Acrobat or find that Acrobat's own convert-to-Word filter can't parse documents well enough to make them usable, this new utility ($49.95 from ScanSoft, currently available for $39.95 at the Microsoft Web site) may be just the thing. One caveat: It won't do optical character recognition (OCR) on image-only documents.
Robert Weideman, ScanSoft's chief marketing officer, says his company's research shows that many Office users need to edit documents that exist in both PDF and Word format--and they know that a particular PDF is the current version but they can't figure out which Word document on their hard drive matches up to that PDF.
Furthermore, he says, sometimes a person will be assigned to update a company document for which the original doesn't exist or can't be located. Citing Coopers & Lybrand research, he says that creating a new document from scratch costs an average of $250 in labor and lost time that could be devoted to other projects.
PDF Converter solves the problem by making a new Word document from any PDF, tagged or not. At the heart of the utility is the document-structure recognition intelligence built into ScanSoft's OmniPage OCR software, which is designed to divine structure from documents-such as faxes, scanned images of paper documents and others--where there isn't any. ScanSoft claims to be able to faithfully re-create text flow, tables and graphics from the original.
"PDFs don't carry along with them information from the authoring application. In the same way that paper doesn't contain structure and information, neither do PDFs," Weideman says of PDFs that aren't tagged--the kind most Office users must work with on a regular basis. "So when Adobe says it's electronic paper, they're literally right. PDF is almost as limited as paper in the sense of trying to get it back into an application like Word."
The utility makes the process simple, adding a command to the File menu in both Word and Windows Explorer that enables PDFs to be opened in Word. It also adds an "Open in Word" command to the menu that pops up when a link to a PDF document is right-clicked in Internet Explorer, as well as in Outlook when a PDF attachment is received.
Of course, the engineers at ScanSoft could make all PDFs a PC user receives default to opening in Word, but Weideman says the company decided that particular wrinkle would be more an irritant than a boon to the customer.
PDF Converter will also be useful for grabbing graphics for repurposing, Weideman says. Users who have tested the software have extracted graphics from PDFs with PDF Converter and popped them into PowerPoint presentations, or grabbed text clippings (as opposed to whole documents) for use in their own projects.
PDF Converter is getting a shot of world-class promotion, as ScanSoft embarks on a 60-plus city tour with Microsoft and other software vendor-partners starting in October to tout the release of Office 2003. Furthermore, Microsoft makes mention of PDF Converter in its new office.microsoft.com site, which also exposed the utility to 500,000 Office 2003 beta testers and in the future will put it before a million pairs of eyeballs each month.
How did ScanSoft get cozy with the folks in Redmond? Weideman says that Microsoft has licensed software components from ScanSoft over the years in its applications, including OCR as well as digital-rights management. Making a PDF conversion utility was a natural fit this year, he says.
"We see it as a gateway into our other software solutions," Weideman says. "What we found is that most people either don't know that you can convert paper into Word documents, or they don't believe it works. Our products do work, and we see a good cross-sell."
For more information, see
Office 2003 Online and
PDF Converter at ScanSoft.
