gDoc Fusion

Ever since Adobe's PDF format became an open standard for print and other types of file exchange, the market for budget PDF software has started to become a little crowded, so a new package must offer something a little different.

The biggest thing that stands out with gDoc Fusion is its support for XPS, or the XML Paper Specification. This is a rival format to PDF developed by Microsoft and Global Graphics that has since been released as an open standard to take on Adobe's popular format.

You are unlikely to find many documents being exchanged in XPS at present, but it works in a very similar fashion to PDF and may gain ground over coming years.

Most people, however, will consider using gDoc Fusion for creating and managing PDF files. gDoc Fusion also includes gDoc Creator, a handy utility that can create PDFs quickly and simply from Microsoft Office and other documents, and which is now available as a free standalone product. With gDoc Fusion itself, you can also edit and manage PDFs, incorporating comments or exporting documents to Word format.

The gDoc Fusion interface is extremely easy to use, and for quick conversions to or from PDF you can simply drag and drop files onto the welcome screen. The other views - page, document, and flick view - provide more control over working with PDF files so that you can edit individual pages or merge other documents without losing formatting. Various options also allow you to fine-tune such things as print settings.

One thing to be aware of is that, as with other PDF packages that are not Acrobat, gDoc Fusion is restricted with creating documents in the PDF format, in this case up to version 1.6, even if the version now set at ISO 32000 is PDF 1.7. This is unlikely to pose too many problems, as the most significant additions to PDF, such as multimedia embedding and digital signatures, were all implemented previously. If you need support for the later features, however, as well as advanced form editing features, Adobe Acrobat Professional is still the best software on the market.

gDoc Fusion compares favourably to the other PDF editors and creators on the market, such as Foxit PDF editor and ABBYY PDF Transformer. Although slightly more expensive, it is generally a simpler to use editor, particularly as it integrates so well with Microsoft Office, the software which many of us still use to generate documents that are eventually converted to PDF.