The Best PDF Converter I've Been Able to Find
8
By When I created my Podsnapper Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting, I looked high and low for the perfect PDF Converter. Much to my surprise, I discovered and tried a bunch of ‘em; like maybe 20. Ultimately, I settled on a program called deskPDF Professional (link below).
A little background on PDF converters for the uninitiated …
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It’s pretty much become a standard in the micro-publishing world. Most ebooks are in PDF format, as well as many other documents. The reason it’s so popular is because the only thing you need to read PDF documents is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, and most computer systems have it pre-installed when you buy the system.
So, if you’re a solopreneur who’s publishing any kind of documents (and I hope you are), you need to have a good PDF converter. You could buy the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, but it sells for about $270.00 on amazon. You could also go with one of the many free converters available (search Google). The problem with every one I tried, however, is they don’t convert embedded hyperlinks. In other words if you want to link some text, for example “this is my website,” the free converters I tried don’t carry the link over into the PDF documents. No big deal if you don’t have any links in your document, but that’s rare nowadays. In my Podcasting manual, I probably have a few dozen links, and I want my readers to be able to click on those links.
You could also use the free open source office suite called Open Office. This is a collection of programs almost identical to the Microsoft Office Suite. The word processor program in Open Office has a built-in PDF converter that does convert all hyperlinks. The drawback to this program is it’s a huge program that eats up quite a bit of disk space and memory. Again, no big deal if you don’t mind that, but there’s a more efficient solution, although not free.
As I said above, my final choice for a PDF converter is deskPDF Professional (aff link). Here’s how it works. I create my document in Microsoft Word and include any links I want to include. Then I select the print command in Word. When the print screen pops up I simply choose deskPDF as my printer (click image to right), because it’s known as a printer driver. It doesn’t actually print the page. It simply converts it to a PDF file while maintaining any and all embedded hyperlinks. Nice and easy.
The only flaw I was able to find with the program is this. If you create your original document in landscape format (11″ wide x 8.5″ tall), it doesn’t convert the links properly. It converts perfectly for the standard portrait format (8.5″wide x 11″ tall) though. The company’s representative, Brent Gaynor, informed me they’d correct the landscape problem in the next release of the program. In the meantime, it’s still the best little PDF converter I’ve been able to find, and at $29.95, it’s a bargain compared to Adobe Acrobat.
About the Author
Michael Pollock is the marketing and product development guy for Solostream. He's also a blogger, a web marketing trainer and an entrepreneur. When he's not evangelizing Solostream, he trains other solopreneurs on how to use the web to reach more people, earn more money and live a bigger life. Michael's Website.
There are many PDF to Word Converters on the market,but it is important to choose a good one to convert our pdf documents to other format,i used a lot of version,and felt not very good.last week,I downloaded a program called Advanced pdf to word 5.0. It’s pretty good in preserving the formatting. It also allow us to convert a lot files at the same time.I am quite satisfied with it.
You can learn more in http://www.advancedpdfconverter.com
I am no expert, but I just wanted to know if there is a program out there that can create hyperlinks automatically for you. For instance, if you open a PDF document and perhaps click a button called create hyperlinks, the program would, for example, find a word in the document called “Planet PDF Forum” and link all references to this word with the first appearance of this word in the document?
One could then edit unnecessary hyperlinks created by the program so that all hyperlinks are relevant.
Please let me know if this is possible or if there is a program like this out there.
We bought “PDF Converter Professional 4″ from Scansoft/NUANCE. It worked fine so far however we found that with Internet Explorer 7 the PC with Windows XP Professional simple freezes (need to push power off button to restart). When contacting NUANCE they simply replied that the software does NOT support IE 7 and it seems they have no intention to update it. If you go to the “Update” you find only “Special Offers” on your screen. And all this for US$ 70 per license …. not to recommend
Try PDFCreator – it is a free/open-source alternative, and it works very well:
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
- Aamir
p.s. I’m just a satisfied user, and am not affiliated with PDFCreator in any way.
hello, yes, great info. i needed a cheap effective pdf engine for a laptop at home. since i am not doing any industrial strength pdf tasks like with PDF-X-Robot, i did not need the expensive adobe acrobat. so, it was while looking for another cheaper solution that i land on this page. great info, good advice. come visit sometime.
Adobe Acrobat Alternative…
If you create info products, documents for teleseminar participants, or documents to share with colleagues or employees, you know that sending a document in .pdf has the best chance of being opened on any operting system. But converting to .pdf can be …
I’m a convert! I purchased this software last night and used it this morning. The biggest pain with Adobe is that you have to manually activate the hyperlinks if they are not in an http:// format. I love the fact that the imbedded links are automatically converted with deskPDF Professional. Most of my docs have dozens of links and this program saved me at least an hour today, just on one document so it’s already paid for itself. Thanks, Michael for the recommendation.
I do have a version of Microsoft Office that I could use at home, but I switched over to OpenOffice anyway. The new version runs much better than the last time I used it a couple years ago, and it has all the features I could need or want. The Export to PDF option is just a bonus, and it saved me the $30 for a PDF printer and (if I didn’t have a version of Office 2000) the few hundred bucks for my office apps.