As with all bytscout programs offered on giveawayoftheday.com AND their website they are ALL just demos of subsets of the bytescout developers SDK product, the downloader of which is always installed without option to decline it, as all these freeware programs are just promotion for the SDK. The GUI's are basic and just about functional but nothing to write home about. Since we are not entitled to unpaid support or to use these in a business environment there is no point in having their for business license given away... might as well just download the freeware and use it under giveaway terms ... it's practically the same thing!

TK  –  5 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+72)

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Todays giveaway comes as lightweight in a free version that can be upgraded with provided license information for commercial usage, otherwise there aren't any functional differences between free and business, except for license and usage terms.

As the name suggests, the software allows for lots of standard operations dealing with PDF files as input, that means, only PDF as input and nothing else, the output is not as limited offering support for TXT, CSV, XML, XLS, JSON, picture formats, HTML etc. but what's really missing is output support for certain office suits like Microsoft Office (doc, docx), Open Office (odt). There are 3 main operation groups, Data Extraction, Conversion and Utilities.

The most useful features are probably the OCR mode, table detector, HTML converter, making a PDF searchable (OCR aswell) and the text remover and standard file operations like split, merge etc. but i guess that is debatable and depends on someones preferences and usage scenarios, imho all features are helpful to some extent and do have a purpose, there isn't much playing around in this program.

If you have a PDF that looks like it contains only text, it may just be a easy looking extraction operation. But if the actual text is a picture, you need OCR to get the text recognized, otherwise the .TXT file may stay empty or only few plain text image descriptions make it into the extracted file.

I used 3 features in my test, TXT extraction, Embedded images extraction, Making PDF searchable.

TXT extraction:
Data Extraction -> Text and Data -> Extract as TXT

Pretty much self-explanatory, if the PDF has lots of columns and side-by-side block text within a page, it may look distorted and then you can use the column detection to work against it, trimming spaces and the space ratio also helps big time. Result was okayish.

Embedded images extraction:
Data extraction -> Embedded images

Pretty self-explanatory too. You can select all, only the amount of pages or individual pages holding a certain picture. It can either use a output format you decide or you can select RAW output. Result was ok as expected.

Making PDF searchable (type of OCR):
Utilities -> Make a PDF searchable

The PDF in question is a printed steam receipt as image, i kept english as default recognition language and used 600DPI instead of 300DPI Resolution due to capitalization mistakes, using the Preview button, you can keep this from happening, until you are fine with the end result (which would and should imply that most if not all characters are visibly ok). It gave me a 95% recognized searchable output PDF file which i'm fine with and i wasn't even on the limit with 600DPI as 1200DPI is the highest.

If you know how to use it, it can be helpful to have in certain situations and scenarios, has lots of operations under the same hood and even if the program itself doesn't have an extensive help file included and you don't know what to do at times, most of the options have a informative tooltip that give you the required info you need in that regard. I'm going to keep it.

kui_  –  5 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+48)

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PDFill FREE PDF Tools is an alternative worth considering.

SCott  –  5 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+37)

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Is there any difference between this and the free version on the developer's page, if using for personal use? It doesn't appear there is, and I'm using this for personal use...

anouk  –  5 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+30)

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The UI of the software looks in-necessarily complicated.
There is not PDF-to -Word extraction which is common in daily use.
I tried to extract a very simple PDF work to text and it turned out a blank page!
Thank you, the GAOTD Team but no, thanks.

abc8808  –  5 years ago  –  Βρήκατε αυτό το σχόλιο χρήσιμο? ναι | όχι (+30)

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