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Quality Comparison: 8 x freeware PDF Readers / Viewers

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J-Mac:
Thanks J-Mac,
I'm talking about acrobat, not reader. That's the paid version, so no luck.

-urlwolf (October 28, 2008, 11:57 AM)
--- End quote ---

Oops! Sorry about that - I thought you meant Acrobat Reader.

I use Nuance's PDF Converter Pro 5 for creating, editing, extracting, etc. I posted here in the past about PDF Converter Pro 3 being horrible - and it was! Very bug-ridden. However this version, 5, works much better, and if you purchased a previous version the update promo allows purchase of the current at a fraction of its retail price.

The only problem I still encounter is with their activation model - every time you open the program - and that sucks! If the activation hook doesn’t open correctly with the program it plants a "Trial Version" watermark right across the page. If you are working at the top of the page, making changes, you don’t see the watermark and if you save it -- you've lost all.

Jim

Darwin:
Jim - I had that problem with PDF Converter Pro 5 as well and traced it to having remnants of either version 4 or version 3 in the registry and/or Documents and User Settings/User folder... I gave up when the fix I describe below didn't survive a reboot (this is from a PM I sent someone in August). However, I am confident that it is an issue with leftover keys as installing PDFC Pro 5 on a clean install of Vista is rock solid.

The keys are at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ScanSoft
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Zeon

and

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ScanSoft
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Zeon

The keys are labelled by program and number (e.g. PDF Create 4). I also found lots of references to version 4 in Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data and also Documents and Settings\User Name\Local Settings\Application Data. In these folders, I found sub-folders from Scansoft, Nuance, and Zeon that had PDF Converter 4 references. I suspect that with all that I missed an installer (or a reference to an installer) somewhere that keeps messing with things on reboot. At any rate, I failed to return it to functionality after that reboot and uninstalled it. While it was working, it did a much better job of making some of my pdfs searchable (version 4 produced less accurate files that were "jerky" when I scrolled through them with Acrobat Reader .

--- End quote ---

You might try requesting a complete remover from Nuance (they produce one, if memory serves) and then running it, rebooting and searching your registry and harddrive for any further registry keys and/or folders and removing them all, rebooting and reinstalling...

Hope this helps,

Mike

J-Mac:
Hi Mike.

Maybe you're right. I'm not even certain that PDF Converter Pro 3 was installed on this machine; I removed it quite a while ago and I think it was on my last PC before this one. As for V. 5, this doesn’t occur all the time, just once in a while. ANd it was only one time that I lost an entire document - I had made a form from a scanned document and completed all but one blank area at the top. When I next opened the document I only had about the top quarter of it visible on the screen as I completed that last entry and then saved. Only after printing it did I see that the watermark from Nuance's Hell was on it!

Their knowledge base claims that there are certain circumstances where the "hook" doesn’t load. My problem is with any application for which the developer insists on making it activate every time it opens. Just another developer that prefers to annoy - and damage the documents of - paying customers instead of those pirating their software.

Thanks!

Jim

Darwin:
Yeah, yesterday, for the first time, the PDFCP 5 installer kept running completely randomly: I'd click on the start menu button or try to invoke the context menu and there it would be... Thus, in my case, it's not that it's trying to activate, just that it occasionally tries to re-install itself. Not very impressive.

I solved it yesterday by uninstalling a couple of applications (Network Magic among them), rebooting, and all is well. THis used to happen occasionally with PDFCPro 4 under XP Pro as well...

EDITED for clarity  :o

urlwolf:
guys, check adobe digital editions, it's finished now, and quite good.
The rendering is as good as only adobe can do; it's free, and it lets you mark pdfs.
it opens very fast, and uses little memory. However, copy/paste eats up all spaces? It's such a glaring omission, it can only be by design? Kills use for academic work, definitely, and prevents notetaking outside the reader.

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