4 stars (Good product - mostly. Bad company - maybe.) - Overall, this is a good product - with a few kinks. I agree with the one reviewer who commented on the lack of product support. The online PDF file just does not cut it. It tells you many things that the software can do but then fails to provide the "how to." Granted, it is a fairly simple program but the documentation is still lacking. The knowledge base is also less than adequate. As another reviewer mentioned, I also was unable to preserve links in any document conversion I tried - yes, I checked the document settings. When you go to the ScanSoft knowledge base and type in "link", you are presented with two solutions that simply do not work. I eventually found that the way to get the links to work - converting or printing from any source - was to 1) get the document converted over into PDF using PDF Converter Pro 2) manipulate and edit the document to your liking in PDF Converter Pro - they do have some get features here that blow Adobe away when you consider the price and the software footprint 3) save the document as PDF 4) then open the document up in Adobe Reader 7. Adobe Reader recognizes the links, PDF Converter Pro does not - this is a severe mistake on ScanSoft's part and you will not find this solution in their knowledge base (at least not at this time). For a while, I had PDF Converter Pro act as my default PDF reader, but then found it did not open links - went back to Adobe Reader - ScanSoft is now just an intermediary tool when they could have been a real challenge to Adobe. The two other things I don't like about ScanSoft is that 1) they charge $9.95 - which I refuse to pay - for technical support that should be included in a product manual 2) their registration procedure is not even disguised to look like they are actually taking in information for product affiliated reasons - it is a blatant market survey - and what is worse if you do try to register more than one product, they will ask you the same myriad questions each time. Other than that, it is a good product and does cut through a lot of the mess with document formatting and organization.
One last note - if you are going to upgrade - remove all previous versions first (along with the assistants) via add/remove programs, reboot, and then install - all windows apps need to be closed.
4 stars (Good product with poor documentation and support.) - As with its other products, this company provides poor help
with the product (just a printable pdf document that should have
come in the box) and no indexed, searchable help by keyword or
topic. This full version should offer more "how to" assistance
without searching the web site (which searches badly--I searched
for "maximum size" and got a response saying I could not use words
like I, and, it, the, and the like, which was irrelevant (i.e.,
broken search engine). Nevertheless, it does some useful things.
1 stars (Doesn't even install!) - Don't even think about buying this software. It's a waste of money and time. My copy didn't even install. It threw up an "AddPrinterDriver" error. My machine is a standard Windows XP SP2 machine - nothing special. Just pony up the few extra dollars and buy the Adobe product. You'll be much happier. Now I have a $90 software package taking up space in my trash can. |
