eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Adobe Acrobat Alternatives

ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Pro can be used for basic PDF conversion and creation. The $99 utility can also convert image-only PDF files into searchable PDFs.

ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 can also convert PDF files into editable Microsoft Word, Excel, HTML and TXT formats. Here, we have converted a PDF created using Adobes Acrobat into a Microsoft Word 2003 document.

Users who want to send their documents to others can use ABBYYs document controls to restrict access to the documents. For example, we were able to restrict who could open our documents by password-protecting them.

ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional 4 is a more business-oriented PDF application that allows for editing, creating and converting PDFs. ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional 4 offers many of the same features found in Adobes Acrobat.

Like the ABBYY program, ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional 4 can also be used to convert PDF files into editable Microsoft Word, Excel, HTML and TXT formats. When we converted our test PDF into Microsoft Word, however, ScanSoft was the only one that kept

ScanSoft has the ability to create PDFs using multiple files in multiple file formats.