Transforming PDF documents into Office formats without losing the original layout, and even part of the information, during the process is not as straightforward as it may look. PDF Converter Elite is capable of achieving such conversions thanks to its OCR support and the array of format-specific settings it provides. Besides all known Microsoft Office formats, this app supports “two-way” conversions between PDF and AutoCAD, OpenOffice, HTML, and various image file formats.
PDF Converter Elite opens in an elegant dark-skin interface with a highly-visible bar of conversion buttons on the top side of the main window. By clicking on the icons of the different output formats supported, you will see the various customization options associated to each of them, together with a nice clear view of the original PDF file. You have the option to convert specific pages or page ranges and even specific areas within a page, tell the program to extract the images in the original PDF file, and what to do with unrecognized symbols detected during OCR, among other generic settings.
The program’s OCR capabilities allow it to turn image-based PDF files (also known as “scanned PDFs”) into readable text-based documents. Though all Microsoft apps are supported (including Publisher or PowerPoint) and all supported output formats come with their own set of conversion options, you will find specific and wider settings for PDF to Word and PDF to Excel conversions, which will help you to transpose the original PDF layout into meaningful Word and Excel files. Batch conversion is also supported, though this useful option is limited to PDF to Word, Excel, Publisher, OpenOffice, or TXT conversion processes.
Finally, PDF Converter Elite also comes with some basic editing functionality. This will let you move, delete, resize, rotate, and scale pages, which is great but not enough not make it “the finest Adobe Acrobat alternative”, as advertised – text on PDF files cannot be modified in any way, and no annotation, forms, or accessibility features have been implemented. However, this limitation should not detract from the overall functionality offered by this application and of its main asset – high-quality, highly-customizable conversion tasks between PDF and all known Office document types, AutoCAD, HTML, and PNG, JPG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF image files.
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