Despite their many drawbacks PDF (portable document format) files, are ubiquitous and unavoidable if you’re in publishing. It’s a long time since I had the native Adobe Acrobat Reader (or whatever it’s called these days) on my system having opted for Foxit Reader, which mostly does the job just as well, but with many fewer security risks.

Only problem I have with Foxit is that it doesn’t always leave spaces between words when one copies from a PDF to paste into Word or an email, for instance, which is a real pain. On those occasions I usually end up having to send the PDF as an attachment to my Google Mail address and then open it as a Google document in the email online. It works, but that’s a long-winded approach.

Creating PDFs is another matter. Word 2007 does it inline and win2pdf lets you add a virtual printer to your Windows machine that lets you distill any document, page, image into a PDF. There are lots of solutions out there.

New on the scene is Nuance PDF, which solves various problems. If you want to convert a PDF file to Word, Excel, RTF or WordPerfect, it can do that for you “in the cloud“. NuancePDF.com lets you turn PDF files into fully formatted Word and Excel files.

Have you tried it? How does it compare to the conventional tools and to Google conversion within GMail/Docs?

Other posts on PDF

• Nuance’s bold PDF reader goes free (download.cnet.com)
• Nuance PDF Reader Can Convert Files Accurately (labnol.org)
• Extracting content from PDF files (macworld.com)
• How to edit Pdf files free without Adobe Acrobat (techmadly.com)
• Sumatra 1.0 is a Blazing Fast Replacement for Adobe Reader [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Rogue PDFs Behind 80% of Exploits In Q4 ’09 (it.slashdot.org)