Nuance PDF Reader ?

Found this new pdf reader today, but haven't tried yet. Wondering if anyone
has info on this company and their products, please?

http://www.nuance.com/imaging/products/pdf-reader.asp

 

solid company, big on OCR scanning software

 

Thanks Cudni,
Yes they seem like a good outfit, WOT and Siteadvisor both say this. Think I'll
try this, hope it doesn't have an Ask toolbar stuck on! Cheers.

 

Interesting looking product...

I use Nuance voice recognition program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Pro, but I got frustrated with their bloated OCR software, Omnipage, so I switched to ABBYY's FineReader OCR program, which at least several years ago was the better of the two for my needs, and came with an excellent ScreenShot Reader utility to boot.

ABBYY has another great product called PDF Transformer that can convert PDF to editable DOC files and do other transforms. It seems (based on product descriptions) that Nuance's new PDF Reader can do the same for free, plus it's only a fraction of the size of PDF Transformer. Of course you can upgrade the free reader to Nuance's commercial PDF Converter that would seem to be a direct counterpart to ABBYY's PDF Transformer, but the free PDF Reader already appears to have all the best parts in it. So I'm thinking they released this to undercut the competition.

I will test this program and see how it compares to ABBYY's PDF Transformer 3.0.

 

boo! boo! thumbs down!

forget what i wrote above. After installing Nuance's PDF Reader, I opened a 82-page PDF document that I had earlier converted to doc with ABBYY Trandformer 3.0. I wanted to compare how PDF Reader would fare with it so I clicked convert. The program tells me the conversion is an online service, so I'm taken to a Nuance site, upload my document, provide them with an email addy, and read spam about upgrading to their PDF Converter, ... Few minutes later I receive an email saying "The document 'XXXXXXX.pdf' couldn't be converted!" So this is not a serious alternative to ABBYY Transformer, it's just an ad for Nuance's own PDF Converter.

As for a PDF reader alone, who knows, there are so many free ones. I mainly use commercial versions of PDF-XChange and Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended.

In terms of freeware, I like Sumatra PDF because it's only about 1.2 MB (installer size), so I include on rescue disks (BartPE) and on USB sticks among Portable apps. If you need a PDF printer, doPDF is a fine choice, although I have limited experience with both (tried them a few times because of good reviews, they worked, designated them for use on older machines, etc).

 

I need to higlight documents and the XChange is the way if you don't install ask.

 

So how does Nuance render? I use Sumatra and PDF-XChange but find that Adobe Reader still produces the best quality screen output. If there is an alternative reader, preferably portable, that offers an image quality that is similar to Adobe's, I'd love to hear about it!