Turn any PDF into searchable, editable text
PDF Transformer+ is a powerful program for creating searchable PDF documents from scans and existing files. ABBYY is best known for its FineReader optical character recognition (OCR) software. The same engine is used to power PDF Transformer+, which can recognise 189 different languages. A built-in scanner interface lets you import documents directly from either a flatbed or ADF scanner. Other features include the ability to annotate existing PDFs, convert them into a wide range of file formats and create your own PDFs from scanned documents or image files.
There are certain prerequisites if PDF Transformer+ is to carry out accurate text recognition. The text must be in a clear font, such as Ariel or Times New Roman. Unusual fonts with highly embellished flourishes will usually not be recognised by the software. It’s also not up to deciphering handwriting and struggles if text is laid out at an angle or along a curved path.
The speed with which the program can convert static text into an editable form depends primarily on the speed of your computer. The more powerful it is, the faster that conversion will be. A single PDF page took around 30 seconds to convert to Word format on our laptop, which has a dual-core Intel Core i5-3371U 1.7GHz processor. The same process took less than 10 seconds on a PC with a quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600.
PDF Transformer’s foreign-language support means you can easily scan a document in just about any language, and then copy and paste the resulting editable text into a translation program or Google Translate to get the gist of its content. We got pretty good results when we did just that with documents in the Cyrillic, Arabic and Greek alphabets.
Although it’s brilliant to have comprehensive foreign language support, we got the greatest use out of the program when scanning and archiving recipes, magazine articles and utility bills. PDF Transformer+ detected our scanner with no problems, so we could just scan the pages we needed into a single document and then either save it as a standard PDF or turn it into a searchable PDF.
Searchable PDFs can be much larger than their static equivalents, though. Although a plain black-and-white text-only document was only slightly larger in searchable form, a high-quality colour scan of a five-page magazine article at just over 4MB became a 53MB monster of a file when we made it searchable. For this reason, you won’t necessarily want to make every PDF you create searchable.
You can, of course, also export documents to Word, OpenOffice, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUB and other formats. Both images and text are exported in a layout that’s as close to the original as possible, making it easy in many cases to edit the text and then re-create your documents as PDFs.
Another useful feature is the ability to annotate both searchable and static PDFs. If you do collaborative work, or just want to make notes on a document for your own reference, you can place a text box wherever you like and add comments that will appear and be printed as though they were part of the original document. You can also place stamps and digital signatures on a document, password- protect it, and insert digital comments. The latter can be viewed by anyone with Adobe’s free Reader software, but aren’t printed with the document.
PDF Transformer+ isn’t cheap, though it costs significantly less than Adobe Acrobat. It has powerful, easy-to-use OCR, annotation and conversion features. Some basic document-management features would’ve been the icing on the cake, but it’s still a great program.
VERDICT
If you work with text-heavy scanned documents and PDFs, this program is a massive time-saver.