Vista-compliant conversion utility opens PDFs in Office, SharePoint Designer, and FrontPage.Recosoft released this week PDF2Office Professional 4.0, a Microsoft Vista-compatible PDF conversion utility.
PDF2Office makes PDFs openable in Microsoft Office apps (Word, PowerPoint, FrontPage and SharePoint Designer) as well as other types such as rich-text format and AppleWorks. Its main claim to fame is running time-saving filters that organize a document in ways native to Office such as applying styles, paragraph formatting processes headers/footers and footnotes/endnotes, making the content usable in Office.
It also looks at a PDF page's layout and performs a host of tasks such as setting margins and page breaks they way they appear in the PDF and analyzes graphics type and placement—regrouping intersecting/overlapping graphics together in Office apps to preserve page layout. That's key to PDF2Office's new HTML conversion tool that can export to both HTML-UTF8 and HTML-ANSI. It also can do one-click batch process conversion of PDFs to other document formats.
Recosoft beefed up PDF2Office's image-recognition and conversion features. PDF2Office Pro 4 can grab images in a PDF—all the images at once, or one at a time on a per-page basis—and convert them to JPEG, Photoshop, PNG and TIFF formats, either keeping them as is or downsampling to reduce file size.
While image-conversion features are interesting, they're available from many sources. PDF2Office offers text-support features, however, that are less common.
New filters for table-conversion—tricky business known to anyone who's already tried to tackle it—and text-recognition features work on other thorny issues such as hyphenation and recognizing mathematical equations.
Furthermore, the text tools include a new font substitution engine that evaluates fonts in a PDF document and matches them up with those available to the PDF2Office 4 user; this new PostScript font-matching, -substitution and -scaling mechanism works to match the layout characteristics of the original PDF document. PDF2Office's text-support extends to English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Western European-language characters. It provides Unicode support, too.
Other Microsoft Office-friendly features PDF2Office contains include:
- A viewer that shows PDF pages quickly without opening Office apps
- Right-click opening of PDFs in Word
- Drag-and-drop conversion of PDFs to other formats
- Password cracking of protected files
- A logging function that keeps track of all the various things done to a PDF
PDF2Office Pro (Windows) costs $89 ($39.99 upgrade from version 2.5 or free if purchased since April 15). Recosoft offers trial versions for download, as well as a Mac version and lighter, cheaper "personal" and "standard" versions.
Graphics Tools 
