In my line of work and study, using Adobe’s .PDF as a file format is both one of the biggest boons – and gripes – I’m left with. On one hand, PDFs are excellent in maintaining the structure and quality of a document, but on the other are a burden to manage and edit at a later stage.
I’ve often felt that I’m uniquely positioned in this regard – I frequently make use of .PDF files for design and written work, and I am forced to make use of them while navigating a plethora of academic texts; two worlds that seldom collide. It was with interest, then, that I was able to review Investintech’s latest PDF conversion suite in the form of Able2Extract 9.
There are far more snappy names on the market, though Able2Extract offers a unique promise: the ability to convert PDF files into 10 different formats – including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and AutoCAD, amongst others. I’ve often found that a majority of PDF conversion suites offer mixed to dismal results when converting files – so it was with some degree of hesitation that I approached Able2Extract’s claims.
Able2Extract is available on multiple platforms – including Windows, OS X, Fedora and Linux. As the majority of my more complicated and intensive work occurs on OS X – design work in particular – I felt it was the natural platform to conduct my review on.
Installation is snappy, and Able2Extract launches to life without any issue. Refreshingly, the program launches alongside a help service that guides first time users through both the interface and the conversion process. While Able2Extract’s interface appears starkly intense at first glance, the help service quickly facilitates an introduction and lays the program’s features bare.
Running a conversion process is – an all essence – a simple task. PDF documents are opened into the document from any destination on a computer, and are loaded in a document view in the main work area. From there, users can specify what component of the PDF file they’d like converted through highlighting a selection of text, or specifying that all components of the document need to be converted.
From there, users are able to export the selected components of the PDF file into a file format of their choice – the official of supported file formats includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, HTML, AutoCAD, Text, and an image file. My first port of call was to test Able2Extract’s conversion process into Microsoft’s Office suite, which I use extensively.
Pleasantly, Able2Extract fielded all the conversion tests I could throw at it – seamlessly converting a host of PDF images into Word, PowerPoint and Excel files with only one error. While converting to Word, the structure of the document – in this regard, shapes or text boxes – is generally carried across completely with user defined text selection.
Shapes or text boxes can both be deleted easily in Word at a later stage. In the case of Powerpoint, pages were displayed as a full screen slide, while in Excel Able2Extract offers the ability to automatically size columns and rows to the correct size, or through user input. The only tribulation I encountered was that converting to .xlsx files removes certain images from the file, and converting PDF files that contained transparency into Word, which resulted in selectable (and deletable) black shapes appearing where a transparency should.
While to many this would be a bugbear, I imagine those who depend on Excel as a program would care far more on the actual text or data they would want to carry across as opposed to media. In this regard, I was highly impressed with the accuracy and cleanliness Able2Extract presented the converted PDF file in Excel – offering a ready-to-go document that I would feel comfortable making no additional changes to. The Pro version of the software offers the ability to select text from scanned PDF documents – the standard version, which I tested, converts scanned PDFs into media which can be manipulated as an image inside an Office file.
Similarly, conversion of OpenOffice file formats – Writer, Calc and Impress -proved equally as convenient as their Word counterparts, while converting PDFs to either HTML or image format (JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF) offered a convenient way to quickly distribute text to a webpage or into an image file for quick reference or email – image quality in particular can be configured between pixel dimensions as well as ultimate file size. Converting a multi-page document to an image file also enables the option to create an HTML gallery.
The remaining conversion format – AutoCAD DWG or DXF – was another solution which, despite appealing to a niche field, is interesting. Not owning an AutoCAD installation myself, I called in a favour from a good friend – architectural technologist Rahul Dowlath (you can read his thoughts on tech, film, design and much more here). Converting a multi-page (five page) PDF file to DWG format resulted in five separate DWG files – one per page – which opened easily in Rahul’s OS X installation of AutoCAD 2014.
The file conversion worked, though unintended hatch fills were added to the text blocks present on the file. Following selecting and deleting them, text reappeared – indicating that the conversion would likely function best if the PDF file itself contained a drawing. Despite offering slightly inconvenient errors, the AutoCAD conversion facility does offer a quick translation facility for a designer in a rush.
Ultimately, Able2Extract impressed me in a way I didn’t anticipate – it made a large part of my workflow far more manageable, and overall, far easier. I’ve long been privy to the claims of PDF conversion software that’s all too often left a mess of both my design work and academic texts. Able2Extract, for the most part, offered a simple and effective way to rapidly convert PDF files into a variety of usable formats across a broad spectrum of situations. While the programme doesn’t execute all tasks perfectly, it does, for its $99.9 full license price tag, offer a convenient and usable way to quickly transfer general text, images and shapes into a variety of usable formats – a perfect stable for a work-from-home executive.
Score: 8/10.
