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Software Editorial / Windows Reviews / Office & Business / Cosmi Perfect PDF Creator Essentials
When you think of PDF your mind automatically thinks of Adobe. They are to be commended for making a decent Portable Document Format available instead of the multitudinous formats that are foisted on us by a money seeking industry.

Whilst Adobe does an excellent job with its PDF creator software, many would argue that it is just too expensive for the casual user. That is where products such as Perfect PDF Creator come in.

So what does this low cost product offer?

Well for a start PDF Creator offers a vast number of commands with an easy to use interface such as, for example, data encryption of up to 128 Bit, watermarks as text and image, integration of bookmarks and references, (selective) integration of document fonts, simple adding of other documents to the PDF document, integration of text comments and stamps, PDF transfer by e-mail with your standard-e-mail software and lots more.

The feature set of this very impressive product includes the following:

Embedded text and image editor for easy and fast change of PDF-documents

Support of Adobe PDF 1.6 version “One click”-conversion of one or several source files of variety of formats (doc, xls, etc.) to desirable quantity of PDF documents

Digital signature – sign and validate functions

Support of creation and editing of PDF-Forms (buttons, check-boxes, etc.)

Possibility to set PDF-Document viewing options, i.e. full screen, etc.

4 different image compression methods (including JPEG 2000)

Possibility to embed unlimited quantity of watermarks, stamps, comments

Support of widely-used paper formats, up to DIN 4A0

Maximum resolution – up to 4800 dpi

Support Postscript fonts embedding

Embedded PDF documents viewer

Live Update function

How does this work in practice? After installing the program I took some sample Microsoft Word Documents and a few .jpg images using Picasa and tried to convert them to .pdf format using PDF Creator.

Overall, I was very impressed as this program allows full control over the whole process. It is one of those programs that outdoes Adobe. Think of solar over petrol or Lindt over Cadbury. It is a superior product for less money.

Whilst I was impressed by the range of features and the simplicity of use, I was irked when I tried to create .pdf documents from Picasa as they had strange lines through the images. Clearly this is not desirable and perhaps there was some setup options that I had neglected to notice.

If home users who uses products such as Picasa, a perennial favourite, are being targeted with this product I would have thought that these difficulties would not be seen. Certainly, you do not see them in MAC world. In fact, I did try a number of other programs including Adobe Lightroom and found the same difficulties.

Having said that, this is an excellent product which excels Adobe when it comes to non-digital documents. Once soft Xpansion have resolved the digital image issues this will be a product to rival the mighty Adobe. At present for non-digital images it is a superb product – functional and easy to use.

Well done to the David-like soft Xpansion for taking on the giant. Just one more stone in the sling and you will be there.
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