Not possible, [@– bill], when Soft-Xpansion doesn’t even respond to an email ( I’ll be generous and say “yet” ) … but thanks for saying it must be me, I must be “incompetent” – well then, how better, how more “competent” do I need to be to await an email, is there a professional certified tech’s “competent” way to wait for an email to arrive, some way of waiting that I have yet to learn?
– – – – – – – – – –
Ahh, the endless repeats … and for what, it’s not as if I’m editing my telling of my exploring this and sharing, it’s not as if I’m changing my story, it’s always the same, repeated here one more time for the hard of reading and comprehending:
[ SOS Soft-Xpansion offer ] No, I didn’t “… run off into the weeds ( as you presume I did ) …”, I had the software successfully installed without error, without technical challenge, and without any problem UNTIL the Soft-Xpansion software itself tried to phone home, which it could not do, and their alternative of emailing them got no response ( I’ll be generous and say “yet” ) … so, in order to troubleshoot and find the source of the problem, and in order to isolate if it was me not not me, I tried multiple SOS downloads, and I tried multiple computers, all with the same dead-end result: Soft-Xpansion can’t phone home, and Soft-Xpansion have ( “yet” ) to respond to emails … so much for the SOS Soft-Xpansion offer.
[ Soft-Xpansion direct trial ] I did not “… try to mix the free offer here with the trial Perfect PDF offer on its Web site ( hardly a recipe for success given that they were totally different ) …”, but instead, as I wrote, I alternatively tried to install their program downloaded directly from their website, the installation self-exited without installing, saying I must do something else, and which point I gave up trying to overcome Soft-Xpansion’s own inability to present a working PDF editor on my screen. Note, different versions or not, but especially different versions, one would think that Soft-Xpansion would let users of older versions try newer versions to get them to buy newer versions, without having to kill their older version first, and as such, they’d allow a demo trial to install and run from a different directory while the already-licensed older version sat sacrosanct, unscathed, ready to function on demand as always, while the end-user could check out and compare both … just sayin’ … their loss.
You write “… all of that babble was, of course, completely extraneous to the issue of whether the offer here worked …” is not the point, I just wanted to see any Soft-Xpansion’s software somehow someway on screen doing something any-which-way … but their “trial” also stopped and failed, saying I need to do something, at which point I gave up troubleshooting their offerings, considering their company policies themselves to be untroubleshootable and not within my purview to waste time reverse-engineering and spending any more time on, in other words, I gave up, and suggested alternatives to others who were wondering if this was worth going ahead with troubleshooting … no one seems to say what they got, if and when they got it working, if anyone did, nope, not yet, no one has offered a hands-on exploration of discovering the comparative features and benefits of Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor ( the press-release on the opening SOS page is missing any “by doing what” details ).
– – – – – – – – – –
LATE BREAKING NEWS:
I just got an email from Soft-Xpansion ( how many days has it been ? ! ? ), but it is bereft of information identifying what computer and what installation it is licensing, the program on the computer I thought it might match balks saying it is not a valid license, so I have no idea if its not a valid license, or if it is a valid license for another computer, or whatever … so their email has 3 problems, ( 1 ) it’s late, not contemporaneous with installation, ( 2 ) is not identifiable as to what it’s intended use is, and ( 3 ) there’s no way to confirm if its broken or not … so do I ask Soft-Xpansion to try again, to send another license authentication email file attachment, or do I try the one I received on multiple computers hoping it works somewhere, anywhere, oh please oh please oh please … or do I move on, acknowledging that Soft-Xpansion is NRFPTY, Nerf Putty, Not Ready For Prime Time Yet.
– – – – – – – – – –
At this point ( actually a long time ago by now ) I’m just hanging in here to see how ridiculous this can possibly get, and so far, it has lived up to ( down to ? ) expectations, even exceeded expectations, in that
– Soft-Xpansion fails to phone home,
– Soft-Xpansion fails to email home,
– Soft-Xpansion fails to provide an timely and unambiguous response to emails ( apparently it’s not automated, and whatever computer identification coding they use does not identify a computer the way an end user might identify a computer, so there’s no way for an end user to match up their emailed license files, if they work at all, with computers awaiting license permission ).
– – – – – – – – – –
I already share my experience of free Adobe Acrobat Pro PDF editor, and free Ashampoo PDF Pro editor, both of which provide OCR Optical Character Recognition, and I shared a list of other programs to explore, such as OmniPage and so on.
So, what PDF editors are other folks using?
.