Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the great successes of the software industry. PDF has been the de facto standard for document exchange since the mid-1990s, but it wasn't an official ISO standard until 2008.
Unfortunately, the ubiquity of Adobe Reader and other PDF software has made the format a target for malware perpetrators. Along with Sun's Java, Adobe's Flash Player, and Apple's QuickTime media players, it's imperative that you keep your PDF reader up-to-date to prevent it from becoming an entryway for viruses. (I wrote about the importance of keeping your apps updated in a post from last April.)
So when I heard last week about an important security update for Adobe Reader 9, I hurried to the Adobe site to download the new version 9.2. But the 45MB download included a separate program: Acrobat.com with Adobe AIR. This is a Web service for sharing and collaborating on documents. It was formerly called Create Adobe PDF Online.
Update, October 27, 2009: The Adobe site is now offering the Adobe Reader 9.2 upgrade without the Acrobat.com with Adobe AIR component. Thanks to CNET member baddy_3- for pointing this out.
I hadn't signed up for Acrobat.com—registration is required to use the service—I just wanted the Adobe Reader update. I couldn't find it offered on Adobe's site minus the Acrobat.com add-on I didn't want. I contacted Adobe to ask them about this. Adobe spokesperson John Cristofano told me the following via e-mail:
"(I)f a user downloads the full installer of Adobe Reader 9.2 (Windows or Macintosh in English) from the 'Get Adobe Reader' page on Adobe.com, the Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR application will be included. If a user already has a previous version of Adobe Reader 9.x installed on his/her system and the Adobe Updater delivers that person the version 9.2 update (the latest dot release update to their existing product), Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR is not included."
I didn't recall installing Acrobat.com with AIR on my system, but I can't verify that it wasn't installed prior to the update to version 9.2, either. The machine's only six months old, though, and I hadn't signed up for the Acrobat.com service, so I certainly had never used Acrobat.com with AIR if it were on this PC.
In any event, I wasn't inclined to wait for Adobe Reader's auto-update component to fetch and install the latest security patch without Acrobat.com, nor would I recommend that other Adobe Reader 9.x users wait to update their version. And if you updated the program manually from Adobe's download site, you got Acrobat.com with AIR, whether you wanted it or not.
Downloading Adobe Reader 9.2 from the Adobe site requires that you also install Acrobat.com with Adobe AIR.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)You're also offered a free McAfee Security Scan, but at least you can uncheck that option to do without the scan. (If you're still using Adobe Reader 7 or 8, you can update to versions 7.1.4 and 8.1.7, respectively, without having to install any other programs.)
I could've saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I had just stuck with Foxit Reader, the free PDF reader from Foxit Software. I used Foxit Reader exclusively on my old laptop, but for some reason I switched back to Adobe Reader when I bought my new machine last spring. Foxit Reader has a lot of fans, but it's far from the only free Adobe Reader alternative.
Tracker Software Products' PDF-XChange Viewer does a good job of matching Adobe Reader's features and interface while—like Foxit Reader—taking up much less disk space (though at 15MB, PDF-XChange Viewer is almost three times as large as Foxit Reader).
If small is what you're after, try the open-source Sumatra PDF Viewer, which at just over 1MB is downright lilliputian, compared to the competition. The program may lack some of the polish of its larger brethren, but it might be all the PDF reader you need.
An even-smaller free PDF reader is PDF2EXE Software's CoolPDF Reader, which weighs in at a modest 900KB. You'll find capsule reviews of these and one other free PDF reader at the Tech Support Alert site.
By the way, if you're looking for a free way to create PDFs, I described one in a post from March 2008: Acro Software's CutePDF Writer. Coincidentally, that post also included information about the free trial of Create Adobe PDF Online, which has since become Acrobat.com. Talk about going full circle!
There's little that's sexy or even slightly interesting about PDF creation, which is why PrimoPDF has become one of the better PDF-creation programs. In the past, it's done the job of casual PDF creation right the first time you use it, and with a minimum of fuss. It hasn't been without its drawbacks, but the latest version--PrimoPDF 5--addresses most of those.
PrimoPDF 5 looks a lot like PrimoPDF 4, but that's not a bad thing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)If you're unfamiliar with the program, it installs itself as a "PDF printer" so that you can use any program's print function to convert the document into a PDF. Version 5 comes with desktop icon that you can drag and drop files onto for quick conversion, as well as performance improvements and minor changes throughout the program. It also addresses another problem that Primo has had: visibility. In the past, you could only access Primo from your Start menu or by creating a PDF, but the icon allows you to easily jump in and adjust Primo's settings.
Users can now set a default folder to save PDFs to, or opt to choose a new folder for each new PDF. You can also Append or Overwrite an already-existing PDF, and more easily create and edit document properties and PDF security from the main PrimoPDF interface. According to Primo's publisher, NitroPDF, the program starts faster and converts faster, and we did notice that it launched quicker than before--note that this was an empirical judgment, though.
Primo's size has been reduced slightly from 7.49MB to 7.38MB. The four conversion quality settings are still exposed up-front, too, so you can easily toggle quality settings from Screen to eBook to Print to Prepress. There's a Custom setting, as well.
Other features include a password protection feature that can be used for restricting reading, editing, or printing the PDF. However, trying to create a PDF while the interface was already open resulted in neither a new PDF nor a warning that there had been a failure. The interface also sports an ad for other PDF-related software made by Nitro that takes up half the interface.
Those hitches aside, PrimoPDF is an effective tool for quick and casual PDF creation, and that doesn't change with the latest version.
Correction: PrimoPDF's file size has not been reduced to 1.1MB. It has been reduced to 7.38MB.
There are several well-regarded, free ways to take advantage of the Print function to transform just about any file to a PDF. PrimoPDF and doPDF sit at the top of the list, but what about reverse engineering that conversion? Converting in the other direction, from a PDF to a Microsoft Word-compatible format like DOC or RTF is trickier.
For one thing, there's a lot of crap out there. Many PDF-to-DOC converters have similar or even identical names, differentiated sometimes by nothing more than a cunning tap of the space bar. Many offer features that are hamstrung in various ways unless you pay for an upgrade, and just about all of them offer imperfect conversions. Even with these problems, though, you can get a reasonable conversion from the four programs and three Web-based services listed below.
Sometimes right: Some PDF to Word Converter 1.5
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Some PDF to Word Converter 1.5: A basic but uncluttered interface introduces all of the program's conversion options in a sidebar on the right. Some handles batch conversions, converts outer fonts into text and embedded fonts into images, and supports both All Pages and page-range specific conversions. It can remove graphics on demand from the output document, which is always in the RTF format, and supports encryption.
The program suffers from two big drawbacks: the conversions aren't always the cleanest, with occasional image and text overlaps, and there's noticeable image deterioration. In place of drag-and-drop to add PDFs, you can add an entire folder via the folder icon. Some of the interface's option descriptions could be better phrased, too: "delete all graphics" with an option of "false" or "true" really could be posed better as "remove all graphics" and "yes" or "no."
Free PDF to Word Doc Converter 1.1 makes you jump through hoops for a great end result.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Free PDF to Word Doc Converter 1.1 also gets a few things wrong, but eventually lands you the DOC output you want. Impressively, it offers one of the cleanest and most accurate free PDF-to-DOC conversions of the programs tested. You can change the output path and name, convert an entire document or just specific pages, and ditch images in the source PDF if need be. The final output will give you a pitch-perfect conversion.
From there, it goes a bit downhill. The option to open the output DOC in WordPad didn't function when we tested it, nor did the All Pages button. You can work around this by choosing Page Number instead of All Pages (Page Number defaults to the full page count), but it's still irritating. The other big frustration is that while the program is free, after five conversions you're asked to answer a math question a bit harder than the average Captcha. Batch conversion and encryption support are missing, too. If Free PDF to Word Doc Converter's bumpy ride didn't result in such a smooth landing, it wouldn't be worth touching.
Free PDF to Word Converter 1.3: common name, common problems.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Free PDF to Word Converter 1.3 shares many things in common with its competitors besides a similar name: there's an imperfect balance of useful features and a perfect output. What's wrong: there's no drag-and-drop support, and you should be prepared for some minor yet annoying formatting errors, with occasional and minor word and image overlap.
What's right: The program can batch convert PDFs without being restricted to specific folders, can change your output destination, and put out either RTF or DOC. There's support for high levels of security, with space to provide passwords from the PDF owner and the PDF user. You can remove graphics on conversion and micro-manage the spaces between words and text boxes. It's fine for image-free PDFs, but somewhat less than exact with others.
Advanced PDF to Word Converter Free 5.0: nearly-perfect output.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Advanced PDF to Word Converter Free 5.0 nearly crashes and burns on takeoff, but surprisingly leaves you with a nearly-perfect document. It will ask you to reboot on installation, which makes sense for programs that have deep hooks in your operating system but is a clarion warning for such a simple converter. However, as with all these converters, it's the final output that counts the most, and this program's final DOC output looks pretty good.
There's no support for encrypted PDFs, and when you convert or close the program, there's a nag screen to get you upgrade. Batch conversion, RTF and TXT output, and image deletion are restricted to the paid upgrade. The program does offer drag-and-drop additions, adding an entire folder, and user-selected output folders and output renaming. OpenOffice.org users will appreciate that this converter puts out a DOC that OpenOffice Writer can cleanly read images from--unlike many of the others. The biggest problem, of course, is that there is still some image quality degradation and minor text alignment problems.
OpenOffice users should take note that during these tests, I found that the OpenOffice Writer doesn't always play nicely with Rich Text Formatting. There are several free online conversion options as well, and they tend to have better output than the desktop programs.
You can send your PDF as an attachment to Adobe, and within a few minutes they'll send you back either a plain text TXT or HTML file. The service is basic but extremely fast. As long as you don't mind the lack of frills, you can e-mail pdf2txt@adobe.com for the plain text conversion and pdf2html@adobe.com for HTML output, although the HTML service wasn't working when I tested it. More details are here.
PDF to Word, from Nitro PDF.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Nitro PDF, the makers of PrimoPDF, offer a glossy interface for their online PDF to Word format converter. Clearly delineated instructions guide you through uploading your PDF, choosing an output format--either DOC or RTF--and entering your e-mail address. The conversion took a bit longer than Adobe's, but it's worth the wait. The conversion output is a perfect document, precisely the kind of painless process that most of the downloadable options lack. There's no support for encryption, nor for batches, but Nitro's service gets high marks for its precise and fast conversion. Apparently, there are plans to incorporate the PDF-to-Word feature in future editions of Nitro PDF.
There are two other PDF-to-Word services worth mentioning: Koolwire and Zamzar. Koolwire will convert PDFs up to 10MB, but it can also handle DOC, XLS, PPT, VSD, MPP, RTF, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, and MS Office 2007 formats like DOCX. Unlike the other services, clicking on their Web site opens an e-mail to which you only need to attach your PDF and then hit Send. The PDF comes out as RTF, with very minor image degradation and no formatting problems.
Zamzar's uploading interface.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Zamzar will convert PDFs up to 100MB at a time, and in addition to converting your PDF into DOC or RTF, it can output ODT, TXT, PS, and PNG. It can handle batch conversion, as long as you don't mind uploading the files one at a time. When it finishes converting, you receive a link that stays active for 24 hours from which you can download your converted files one at a time or all at once in a ZIP. There was minor image degradation, similar to what Koolwire spit out, and one instance of a formatting error.
Overall, there is no option that can be declared 100 percent perfect. Where one service--whether it's online or desktop--fails, it also tends to offer a better interface, or more conversion options than others. The reverse also seems to hold true, where the best conversions are not always buttressed by the greatest of user experiences. Nitro PDF's PDF-to-Word Web site wins for its output and usability, but if you must go with a desktop client I'd choose Free PDF to Word Doc Converter 1.1 for the resulting document only. If you don't mind minor hiccups, but need a better user experience or more conversion options, Zamzar and Free PDF to Word Converter 1.3 are probably what you need.
Disagree with my picks? Have a better suggestion? Tell me about it in the comments.
[h/t Freeware Genius]
PDFVue is a new tool for both viewing and annotating PDF files. Similar to services like PDFMeNot and PDFHammer, PDFVue can open up PDF files right in your browser, forgoing the need to use desktop software. Better yet, if you've got the service's new browser extension installed, it can be set to automatically open up any PDF link you come across while browsing. This is not the fastest process since it first has to download and render the file, but if you've ever experienced hang-ups with Adobe's Acrobat Reader it's a nice step up.
So why use this service other than for speed? One good reason is the annotation tools. It includes all the usual goodies that let you fill in forms and highlight text. It also lets you upload images to stick into the PDF, making it a lightweight desktop publishing tool, since when you're done you can save it as a separate PDF file.
One thing users may not enjoy about PDFVue is that it doesn't take advantage of your screen real estate very well. Documents are kept to the very middle of the page and cannot be expanded to take up the whole screen. If you're on a desktop computer with a nice big screen, this isn't a problem. But when using it on a laptop, I found myself having to zoom into a level that required quite a bit of scrolling to navigate around the document. This can be somewhat remedied by minimizing the tools window on the right side of the page.
Related: Preview PDFs in your browser without downloading them
PDFVue's PDF editor and viewer is full of tools to that let you mark up PDFs.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Firefox, for all its great functionality and superior performance, has long been a laggard when it comes to managing PDF content on the Web.
Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers both give users the option of reading Portable Document Format content within the browser, while Firefox forces users to navigate to PDFs through its Downloads window. Not very convenient.
Leave it to Firefox's online community, however, to remedy this failing. While there are a range of Firefox plug-ins to help manage PDFs documents, two stand out for me.
The first, Download Statusbar, doesn't actually enable in-browser rendering of PDF documents but gives the user a status bar at the bottom of the browser window that displays the progress of downloads and allows the user to double-click any download to open it in the application of one's choice.
In other words, no more searching for the Downloads window to check on the status of a file download, and no more scouring one's hard drive to remember where the download went. Download Statusbar keeps it all in Firefox. For my PDF documents, I just double-click the status bar to open them in Preview. Easy.
If you use a Mac and you prefer to have PDFs rendered in the browser, you can thank Google for its simple but excellent Quartz PDF viewer, which does one thing really well: opens PDFs as if they were HTML right in the browser. If you want it to do more than that, well, it's an open-source project, so feel free to contribute.
If you use the two together, Google's Quartz PDF viewer overrides Download Statusbar for PDF files. So, if you want to manage PDFs through Download Statusbar, you won't want Quartz PDF viewer. But through add-ons like this, Mozilla and its large and diverse community have you covered.
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There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.
Gone with the transition is the option to open up PDFs as HTML pages straight from the message, which still remains as a viewing option once you're in the new PDF view and in search results from Google.com. Presumably Google.com results will get the updated viewer next. This would be a huge benefit to Google Search users without access to a PDF viewer (like on public or shared computers) as Google's current HTML conversion wipes out much of the formatting that can keep fonts and image placement intact, which can make things like brochures and newsletters unreadable.
The updated PDF viewer in Gmail is now powered by Google Docs.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Foxit Reader keeps pushing the PDF reader alternative with its latest major-point update, version 3. Although there are some long-awaited minor changes, such as auto-scrolling via the center mouse-button or annotating images and highlighted text, there are three major changes as well.
Foxit Reader's interface hasn't changed much, but its features have.
(Credit: Foxit Software)Multimedia content is now fully supported, which means that you can embed video and audio into a PDF and play them back from within Foxit. Although the competition from Adobe has had this capability for a while, this is one that's been long missing from Foxit and ensures that it's not left behind as multimedia embeds become as essential as communicating through the written word.
To add video or audio, there's a filmstrip icon and a speaker icon that you can add to the Toolbar, or you can access them through the Menubar under Tools, Advanced Editing Tools, and choose either the Movie tool or the Sound tool. Most major formats that I tested, including AVI, MOV, MPEG, MP3, WMV, and WAV were supported.
Another new tool is a plug-in that lets Firefox users open PDFs in a Firefox tab. I've never been a big fan of doing this, since it can slow down the browser considerably. Foxit is also such a nimble PDF reader that it opens downloaded PDFs almost instantaneously. However, I'm sure that there are some users that prefer it.
The third major new tool is a plug-in for Foxit itself. Called the OnDemand Content Management, it lets you organize, share, and edit content from within Foxit with other Foxit users. It makes Foxit competitive with Google Docs, Zoho, and other Web-based collaborative tools. Once the add-on has been installed, users should check out the program's OnDemand instructions on the Menubar under Advanced and then OnDemand. The service requires registration to use it, but thankfully, it's free. Otherwise, there'd be little point in trying to compete with Webware solutions.
Additional changes include introducing a somewhat bland landing page when you run the program without opening a PDF, and support for PDF layers. Foxit Reader 3.0 doesn't contain anything revolutionary, but it's still a marked improvement on a program that never fails to put some zip into the slothful PDF.
Sheets To Go, the Microsoft Excel equivalent.
(Credit: Data Viz)BlackBerry users have been waiting for Documents To Go, an excellent document viewer that's been besting native viewers on mobile phones, for years. On Tuesday, Data Viz ended the impatient toe-tapping with Documents To Go Premium Edition 1.005 and its new companion PDF-viewer, PDF To Go.
The Premium Edition of Documents To Go ($49.99 for a yearly subscription or $69.99 for a lifetime license), builds on the Standard Edition that comes preloaded on the BlackBerry Bold (review), which also officially released in the U.S. today.
This pro version lets you read, fully edit, and create new word processing documents, spreadsheets, and slide shows that are compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In Word To Go, for instance, the spell-checking, track-changing, and copy/paste actions are all there. So is support for formatting with bullets, fonts, and form and table inserts, and support for password-protecting those sensitive documents.
PDF To Go is a separate download for viewing PDF documents.
(Credit: Data Viz)Data Viz is also throwing in the new PDF viewer, PDF To Go, with the Premium Edition. Like most PDF viewers on any platform, PDF To Go supports zooming in and preserves formatting on the BlackBerry by wrapping words.
The standard version of Documents To Go is a bona fide perk for Bold owners, who would be otherwise stuck with the BlackBerry's traditionally rather stunted documents viewers. This premium version is certainly better, creating a seamless, intuitive, and feature-packed document handler. You can see a feature-by-feature comparison of the standard and premium versions here.
Documents To Go Premium Edition is undoubtedly a worthy investment for business folks and road warriors, but it also finds competition in eOffice 4.5, which is available for all BlackBerry operating systems (not just 4.5 and above), and which has most of the same features at a slightly lower price ($39.95). eOffice's additional support Google Docs and Spreadsheets, remote access to PC files, and the ability to fax or print documents from the BlackBerry gives Documents To Go Premium a hard run for your money.
You can try Documents To Go Premium for yourself as a free, thirty day trial. It's compatible with BlackBerry's Bold, Pearl Flip, and Storm smartphones.
Turn almost any savable file into a PDF using Print2PDF. Like similar programs, this useful utility installs as a print driver, allowing the user to specify settings such as fonts and image-compression quality inside the print dialog of the other applications.
Users can encrypt, watermark, or sign a document, and can configure user permissions to print, copy, or change the file. During tests, the output quality and conversion speed both proved quite satisfactory. If you're looking to convert documents into the PDF format, this tool will likely have all the options you need.
Newer features include support for prepress graphics-file exchange, file attachments, and a self-extracting client version. There's a lot here, and it works exceedingly well--sure to appeal to home businesses, small business owners, or anybody who needs a sharp PDF creation tool.
The problem with opening PDF files in Firefox is that it tends to slow down your performance, especially if you open a number of them. This simple little extension gives you complete control over PDF files in a Toolbar button.
Rather than stick you all alone with a browser-jarring PDF file, the PDF Download extension provides you the option to: download the file locally, open it with Firefox using the PDF download options settings, view the PDF as an HTML file in the browser, bypass PDF Download, or cancel the link. The first two options are self-explanatory, while the "view as HTML" feature works a bit like Google's own version of the feature, speeding load times while largely abandoning formatting. The dialog box also displays the size of the target PDF file, which can help in deciding which option to choose.
The latest updates adds one incredible feature, in addition to the bug fixes. Users can now convert the Web page they're looking at into a PDF, complete with hyperlinks. It doesn't like pages with embedded content, changing Flash videos, for example, into links back to Adobe. But even with that limitation, the former Web page looks fine as a PDF. The plug-in now supports Firefox 3 and its social networking branch, Flock. PDF Download isn't fancy for an extension that bills itself as "one of the most popular Firefox add-ons ever," but it could be a big help for journalists, government workers, and others who spend considerable time with PDFs.
