PDF Converter Master 4+

Helpful and Smooth

I purchased this on a recommendation from my Design listserve. We are frequently faced with getting working materials out of PDFs. These PDFs could come from so many different sources. And the formats we are called to work in vary widely. I don't expect magic but I do like having a good can-opener, The list of conversion possibilities is especially broad. I tested some complicated layouts and was pleased with how they were handled.

The UI is nice and sleek. I had no problems going forward, and it appears there are some deeper ways to explore individual parts of a file. Thank you for this reasonably priced tool. As formats and versions continue to grow deeper, its good to have something that can help take the most-likely version of a file and make something to work with out of it.

GREAT TIME SAVER! Finds tables in small and large pdf tables and converst into Excel spreadsheets!

Copying and Pasting data from tables in pdfs to excel spreadsheets is a complex and difficult task and there are many traps that can really bog you down. It is possible to do manually but it takes a long times. Sometimes you copy a pdf table and paste into excel and it magically translates into the right rows and columns. Most often though all the data gets merges in one column or row and you have to do some data acrobatics to sort things out. Sometimes you can individual select rows or columns to make this easier but most often you cant. This app makes the process much simpler. Everything shows up in the right cells. It's not automatic though. Because of number conventions you might have to do some conversions. There are too many variables to have a seemless process. I've tried a number of different apps that didn't work and many actually made the task hardes. This one works well and definitely saves a lot of time. it can handle small flles it can handle documents with 100s of pages with many embedded tables.! It's not perfect but anyone seeking one button automation is being unrealistic.

One caveat this does not include OCR. This is for tables where you can already copy and paste text. You might need an additional step and app for that.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your detailed feedback, we appreciate it. Indeed, it's not easy to extract table from PDF due to the complexity of different table structures in different documents. Automatic conversion may not work for all kinds of tables. That's why we set a few detection methods, and even let users to mark table areas manually. We will keep working on this feature in update. About the OCR issue, hopefully we could find a more cost effective solution for scanned file conversion. Again, thanks for your feedback. If you have any further suggestion, please feel free to contact us via support@lightenpdf.com, thanks.

Good Enough, Can Be Improved

PDFs are intended to be a final format so formatting is done in the way that’s most efficient for PDF; NOT for future editing. WIth that in mind, the app does what it says and does it within reasonable expectations. A medium sized PDF with tables was accurately converted to an editable Word document with very few formatting errors. A very large PDF made the conversion to epub, but unfortunately the current version of iBooks reported it as corrupt (the PDF itself was dicey in its original form however). This app is at least as good as anything else in its price range, and has a wide variety of output options. The interface is a bit dated, but it’s easy enough to figure out and it works. I have not tried the OCR, but it’s cheaper to add it on than to buy a separate program, so I may do that later and will update this rating accordingly.

could be improved by updating the interface to something more modern and in keeping with current guidlines. Also some sharing of history and other data as well as HandOff with the iOS version would be a nice add on. It’d be nice to be able to see whether I’d made an attempt with a file on the other platform before going ahead with a new document.

Developer Response ,

Hi iByron, thank you very much for your review and your suggestions. About the EPUB conversion, would you please contact us via support@lightenpdf.com and send us the original PDF file for testing? So we can try to test the output with iBook and have it fixed. We will keep improving PDF Converter Master, user's feedback is very important for us, thanks again!