Nuance PDF Converter
Converter, editor and, er, ‘OCRer’
£79.99 FROM Nuance, nuance.co.uk Needs OS X 10.10 or later
This app isn’t just for converting PDFs. You can add annotations, rearrange pages, make edits, and weld new PDFs to your existing ones.
It also includes OCR, to add a searchable text layer to scans. In our tests, a high-res invoice had minimal errors, but a medium-res magazine scan became a garbled mess. Edits are possible, but fiddly, often requiring you to click and update individual words within a dialog box, rather than all the text at once. Still, for simpler documents, the feature’s a user-friendly boon.
Conversions also proved variable, but were dependent on document complexity and output format. After all, you wouldn’t expect a magazine layout to survive unscathed into RTF. However, we were impressed to find designoriented table-based layouts from InDesign remained largely intact when converted to Word. Conversions go through Nuance’s server, which takes several minutes.
Elsewhere, the interface is usable and annotations work fine. There’s even an audio option, but audio annotations don’t work in all apps (such as Preview). PDF Expert 2 is cheaper, friendlier and nicer to use, but this is a decent buy if you need conversion and OCR rather than just editing.