Pdf documents are great for those sending out documents electronically, as the fonts and formatting are preserved, but they can be frustrating for those on the receiving end.

Adobe Acrobat is beyond most budgets so there is no way to get access to the contents of the pdf.

PDF Transformer Pro 2 is from the same company, Abbyy , that produces FineReader ; in fact, this is basically the pdf part of the FineReader package, with the optical character recognition as a backup in case text cannot be extracted.

It can also be used to create pdfs. As this has never been included in Microsoft Office, and was recently dropped from Office 2007, it's a feature that will appeal to many.

Although also functioning as a standalone application, PDF Transformer integrates into Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer for opening documents.

The main screen shows a preview of the pdf document and the various settings are listed to the right. It's possible to convert a document with just two steps: simply open the file and then start the transformation. The wizard can work on all the pages or just a selected range.

The layout of the final document can be adjusted, whether to retain the full layout or to keep the flow of text with images breaking it up. By default, the software looks for the text embedded in the document, but it can treat the document as an image instead.

Our 58-page test document took around 10 minutes to convert, both with and without pictures. It coped with columns, but some areas of text with very big fonts or wide spacing caused slight problems. Converting to HTML kept internal links.

PDF Transformer can detect text and picture areas before starting the transformation process. However, if you use the wizard, there's no way of reviewing the images; a shame, since an extra step to review images wouldn't really slow down the process that much.

All in all, this is a good package for anyone regularly dealing with pdfs.

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