Feedback on NovaPDF Pro from Winners and everyone else

[Grr]

Just came home, got the key in my email. Its a bit late to test it, (12:30 AM).
Will post the review tomorrow :-)

Okie..have a good nite sleep..

[vivek]

Well NovaPDF is very good addition to my system,I have created a simple PDF and looks good.The Quality is what impressive to me...

[Grr]

Pros

1. multiple language support.
2. add-on for MS word
3. good in converting Hyperlinks
4. Support for Windows 7 & 64-bit OS
5. Printing from a 740pages PDF with added watermark took 2min & 2 seconds...Good
6. Low use of system resources
7. Option to select profiles on each print. Could be disabled also.
8. When a txt of 1.14mb/1076pages is printed, it creates a pdf of 2.9Mb. Creating pdf form same txt using PDFCreator gives a pdf with size as 1.45Mb. Good!!
9. Tables in word r not distorted on printing to pdf.
10. Printing from ppt to pdf gives quality images.

Cons

1. No update button to check for update
2. even after registering still buttons like Register & Buy Now are not grayed off.
3. Should have a context menu print option.
4. Add-ins for Microsoft® Office Word is not installed and is not visible [office-2003]
5. Fails to open Hyperlinks in a pdf printed word/text document in Default Browser [IE]. Instead opens in secondary browser [FF], which is open.
6. Crashes very badly if there is an attempt to print a watermarked pdf, adding another watermark.
7. Does not prints words/alphabets/characters in a Microsoft Word-2003 document which have background set to blinking.
8. Degradation in the quality of images in a word document, when printed to pdf.
9. I could not find a way to save the printed pages to Desktop by default. Instead it always saves by default in My Documents. Even creating a new profile didn't have any such setting.
10. Bookmarks in MS Word-2003 are lost while printing to pdf.
11. When a PPT of 1.17mb is printed, it creates a pdf of 15.8Mb. Creating pdf from same PPT using PDFCreator gives a pdf with size only as 827Kb.

[Avinash]

Thank you Grr for such a wonderful review . I would just forward this to the concerned guys at NovaPDF. Hope they can answer some of your "Cons".

Update : Just forward your feedback to Novasoft guys.

[Grr]

Thank you Grr for such a wonderful review . I would just forward this to the concerned guys at NovaPDF. Hope they can answer some of your "Cons".

Update : Just forward your feedback to Novasoft guys.

Thanks Yaar...hope those Guys respond...

[software112]

Thank you for the review Grr, however I do have some comments regarding the Cons:
1. No update button to check for update
It's true, you cannot check for updates from the application, this is something we're implementing in version 8. However we make our best to announce everyone when a free update is out there (twitter, rss, website, email sent to user, ...)

2. even after registering still buttons like Register & Buy Now are not grayed off.
This shouldn't be a Con. Actually we have users that change licenses in between their computers or want to add additional ones - if we would grey that out they wouldn't have the option to re-enter the key anymore once put in.

3. Should have a context menu print option.
It will have, however right now the OS itself offers a Print option - if you put novaPDF as default you'll get the document right-clicked on sent to it for conversion to PDF.

4. Add-ins for Microsoft® Office Word is not installed and is not visible [office-2003]
During the installation you are asked to installed the add-in for Office. The option is checked by default. Did you leave that option checked and still the add-in wasn't installed? Did this happen to anyone else here? We offer it as a separate download too so you might want to try installing it directly from

You Must Be Registered and Logged On To View "URL" BBCode Contents...

but again it should appear in the first time if you left that option checked

5. Fails to open Hyperlinks in a pdf printed word/text document in Default Browser [IE]. Instead opens in secondary browser [FF], which is open.
This is not a problem with novaPDF is actually a problem with your PDF reader and/or browser association. novaPDF only does the hyperlink conversion, it doesn't "tell" the reader with which browser to open it.

6. Crashes very badly if there is an attempt to print a watermarked pdf, adding another watermark.
Can you reproduce this or better yet tell us what you did exactly to crash it? I understand you have a PDF with watermarks and you are converting it again to add another watermark to it?

7. Does not prints words/alphabets/characters in a Microsoft Word-2003 document which have background set to blinking.
- blinking backgrounds were removed in Word 2007 and most likely they won't be supported anymore in future versions. I don't know why you would create a text with blinking background only to print it to PDF after that

8. Degradation in the quality of images in a word document, when printed to pdf.
In Printing Preferences there's a Graphics tab where by default Compress is selected, choose None and print again, the quality of the images should be better but larger PDFs resulting.

9. I could not find a way to save the printed pages to Desktop by default. Instead it always saves by default in My Documents. Even creating a new profile didn't have any such setting.
In Printing Preferences there's a tab for Save and under Save options there's a Configure Save Options button where a Always use this Folder option is present - you can select Desktop by default there.

10. Bookmarks in MS Word-2003 are lost while printing to pdf.
Please note that the Bookmarks option in novaPDF (when not using the add-in) doesn't convert existing Bookmarks to PDF Bookmarks. What it does it converts text formatted in a particular manner to PDF Bookmarks, based on the definitions you add for those via the Bookmarks tab in Printing Preferences.
However the add-in for Word does just that, meaning it will convert bookmarks from Word into PDF.

11. When a PPT of 1.17mb is printed, it creates a pdf of 15.8Mb. Creating pdf from same PPT using PDFCreator gives a pdf with size only as 827Kb.
This is not an accurate comparison because by default we don't use the same compression settings as PDFCreator. One common thing in getting PDFs that large is by resizing images within powerpoint itself (or cropping them), instead of doing that externally and including them in PPT after that. What you can do for instance is select one image in the PPT, then click on Compress from picture properties (make sure you apply the option to all pictures) and make sure you check the "Delete cropped areas of pictures" option.

[Avinash]

Thank you guys from Novasoft for such a detailed clarification. Hope Grr will be satisfied with the answers and may help produce some errors as happened while testing so that Novasoft guys can see if there is really some problem somewhere.

[Ashwin]

Used my HP Laserjet printer to print the files.
I dont have Microsoft Office or Open Office on my PCs.
But i do have full commercial versions of Ashampoo Office 2008 and Softmaker Office 2008.
So , here is my review.

Pros
1. Instantly creates PDFs from Notepad and Wordpad.
2. Creates PDFs from Ashampoo Textmaker.
3. Embedding of watermarks is very simple and easy.
4. Different page layoutslike single, Facing, Continuous and 6. Continuous-facing are available.
5. Prints watermarked PDFs in a jiffy.
6. A 2.2 mb Textmaker file created a 810 kb PDF file.
7. Easy to save your PDFs wherever you want by default.
8. Encryption of files is possible. You can make the PDFs Read-only with permissions for printing, modifying, etc.
9. Predefining of page size is possible.
10. Temporary profiles can be set different printing jobs.
11. Automatically detects url links and converts them into PDF links.

Cons
1. Quality of images from Textmaker, HTMLs gets degraded by 10-15%.
2. Conversion of HTMLs into PDFs using Firefox 3.5 is not satisfactory. Some images are out of place and some are cut. The same problem with Flock and Opera 10. Also the background color does not show up.

Note:Will test it out further and provide feedback in case i find anything else worth mentioning.

[software112]

Thank you ashwin for testing novapdf too

1. Quality of images from Textmaker, HTMLs gets degraded by 10-15%.
Have you modified the settings in Graphics (under Printing Preferences) to see how the quality of images modifies? Also on the Page tab there's a dpi to use for images, you should increase that too to see the fidelity of reproduced images.

2. Conversion of HTMLs into PDFs using Firefox 3.5 is not satisfactory. Some images are out of place and some are cut. The same problem with Flock and Opera 10. Also the background color does not show up.
Have you tried printing one of those html pages from Firefox to the regular printer too and compare how it looks with the PDF? Because we print just like a regular printer, but the result of the PDF depends on how the html page is coded and most likely the same issues will be present in regular printing too. It's based on the way the browser renders that page for printing. Also, background color/images are not printed by default in browsers, you have to check an additional option to print Background images (for instance in Firefox you have to go to File-Page Setup and check the option to print Background color and images, other browsers have a similar option too).

Again thank you for the feedback and keep it coming .

[Grr]

Thanks software112/Novapdf for such a fast response.....AMAZING!!!!!!!!!

Thanks to Avinash also....

Please see my responses below in blue

1. No update button to check for update
It's true, you cannot check for updates from the application, this is something we're implementing in version 8. However we make our best to announce everyone when a free update is out there (twitter, rss, website, email sent to user, ...)

Nice to know it is being implemented, good for users like me as i'm not on twitter, RSS, etc...

2. even after registering still buttons like Register & Buy Now are not grayed off.
This shouldn't be a Con. Actually we have users that change licenses in between their computers or want to add additional ones - if we would grey that out they wouldn't have the option to re-enter the key anymore once put in.

Hmm..I got it now...But looked a little odd to me in first place

3. Should have a context menu print option.
It will have, however right now the OS itself offers a Print option - if you put novaPDF as default you'll get the document right-clicked on sent to it for conversion to PDF.

Ok. I will wait for version 8 to see it. I'm one of those ppl who print to pdf like idiots in a day, and would like not to open files and then do a Print

4. Add-ins for Microsoft® Office Word is not installed and is not visible [office-2003]
During the installation you are asked to installed the add-in for Office. The option is checked by default. Did you leave that option checked and still the add-in wasn't installed? Did this happen to anyone else here? We offer it as a separate download too so you might want to try installing it directly from

You Must Be Registered and Logged On To View "URL" BBCode Contents...

but again it should appear in the first time if you left that option checked

I did select the add-on while installation. It is available in Excel, but not Word. I'm running XP with SP-2

5. Fails to open Hyperlinks in a pdf printed word/text document in Default Browser [IE]. Instead opens in secondary browser [FF], which is open.
This is not a problem with novaPDF is actually a problem with your PDF reader and/or browser association. novaPDF only does the hyperlink conversion, it doesn't "tell" the reader with which browser to open it.

Could it not be hard coded to open the hyperlink in default browser? Please consider this suggestion.

6. Crashes very badly if there is an attempt to print a watermarked pdf, adding another watermark.
Can you reproduce this or better yet tell us what you did exactly to crash it? I understand you have a PDF with watermarks and you are converting it again to add another watermark to it?

Steps:
1. I added watermark[image] using Nova to an existing pdf (760pages)
2. I again tried adding another watermark [image] to the pdf in 1.
3. It went on spooling/printing for a long time.
4. after some 15 minutes, it ate-up 700Mb on my disk...and I could see it still spooling/printing.
5. Finally it crashed, as there was no HDD space available.
6. the new pdf file showed as 0Kb.

7. Does not prints words/alphabets/characters in a Microsoft Word-2003 document which have background set to blinking.
- blinking backgrounds were removed in Word 2007 and most likely they won't be supported anymore in future versions. I don't know why you would create a text with blinking background only to print it to PDF after that

I still use 2003 office. I have many documents with blinking background. Using Novapdf to convert them to pdf, in some documents blinking background were converted like normal letters, but in other cases the converted pdf just showed as blank where there was a blinking background letter(s).

8. Degradation in the quality of images in a word document, when printed to pdf.
In Printing Preferences there's a Graphics tab where by default Compress is selected, choose None and print again, the quality of the images should be better but larger PDFs resulting.

Yes a bit of difference in quality and lot in file size. See below:

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/2193/86944337.jpg

9. I could not find a way to save the printed pages to Desktop by default. Instead it always saves by default in My Documents. Even creating a new profile didn't have any such setting.
In Printing Preferences there's a tab for Save and under Save options there's a Configure Save Options button where a Always use this Folder option is present - you can select Desktop by default there.

Yes it worked..!!!! I can by default save to desktop....more clutter on m desktop

10. Bookmarks in MS Word-2003 are lost while printing to pdf.
Please note that the Bookmarks option in novaPDF (when not using the add-in) doesn't convert existing Bookmarks to PDF Bookmarks. What it does it converts text formatted in a particular manner to PDF Bookmarks, based on the definitions you add for those via the Bookmarks tab in Printing Preferences.
However the add-in for Word does just that, meaning it will convert bookmarks from Word into PDF.

Hm...So i want that add-on to work by all means..

11. When a PPT of 1.17mb is printed, it creates a pdf of 15.8Mb. Creating pdf from same PPT using PDFCreator gives a pdf with size only as 827Kb.
This is not an accurate comparison because by default we don't use the same compression settings as PDFCreator. One common thing in getting PDFs that large is by resizing images within powerpoint itself (or cropping them), instead of doing that externally and including them in PPT after that. What you can do for instance is select one image in the PPT, then click on Compress from picture properties (make sure you apply the option to all pictures) and make sure you check the "Delete cropped areas of pictures" option.

Agree, but an application itself while printing should take care of all this, rather than user going through all this activity. And I was using the default settings in PDFCreator.