Okay, success-ish on the umpteenth try, a second email arrived form Soft-Xpansion, and I learned to take inventory and track my own
– email address,
– computer,
– key,
– computer code,
– and software version,
… all of which must stay related and tracked, and any variance in any one of them requires tossing all efforts, and starting over,
… because Soft-Xpansion does not keep track of any of those critical control elements … a clue about the similar ( non ) workings of their software, read on …
I cannot imagine a corporate customer tracking and managing all of those variables.
Otherwise, the prior license file I received does nothing, I have no idea how to correlate what email, computer, key, computer code, and software version it applies to, so it is a waste of time and space, and if I want to try again, I’d have to start from the beginning, probably at the SOS main page with another email, right from the start.
I now have Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor on screen, and I see why no one has commented – it sux.
I’m shocked – SHOCKED – at the paucity of responses within the program to my mouse-pointing at anything and right-clicking to see what I can do with anything I point at, and almost nothing responds to right-clicking with a pop-up menu indicating what controls I have over the thing I am pointing at and clicking on.
Was this designed during DOS days, or on mainframe terminals with no mouse?
Yet something as simple as tapping the [ Delete ] key actually deletes something from a PDF page without warning ( was I even pointing at anything? I could not tell, there was no highlighting, either ! ), but right-clicking on the same thing that was there a moment ago previously gave no response, no pop-up control menu offering [ Delete ], among other control things.
I feel for the programmers, because PDFs themselves suck, they are static page presentations, not dynamic or logically-flowing content, in spite of the effort that we as readers go through to recognize page elements versus page contents – that’s one berserker challenge for PDF-to-DOC/Epub conversion, because invariably, the converter puts the page headers and footers inside the body of the converted text, right in the middle of sentences, but we as readers ignore the headers and footers as we read contents, apparently, no one has figured that out yet, definitely, Soft-Xpansion has not figured this out yet.
A significant challenge I had in the past was to audit and reflow page elements inside PDF documents so that screen readers for the blind would present the contents in a logical fashion, at least Opera browser will create a full-length single-web-page PDF, instead of arbitrarily bifurcating and paginating the body-text contents into meaningless pieces, and causing screen readers to interrupt the flow by repeating headers and footers over and over every few hundred words, and Blackberry has a great PDF reflow algorithm where I could read a 500-page book on the little 3-inch screen with no problem, because it re-flowed according to contents, not according to arbitrary and unrelated printed-page layout – yeah, PDFs are an inexcusable mess, I hate them, and only want to dump their contents to Epubs, Epubs where reflow is designed in.
Sadly, a text export from Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor from a text PDF document ( not even a scanned and OCRd document, ut a PDF built probably as a page-print form a word processing document ) produces a tab-delimited text file where every word is separated from the prior word by a tab, oh my, it looks like a spreadsheet, and what do I do, open it in Word and search-and-replace tabs with spaces and hope for the best … I suppose I can write a VB script that looks for carriage returns with no punctuation and tries to reconnect sentences that have hard carriage returns in the middle of them, then manually find page numbers and headers and footers and other page elements that have landed in the middle of sentences, and delete such interruptions, what a joy.
Sadly, Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor has no understanding of the contents from a reader’s point of view, but instead “sees” a PDF “document” as just an endless series of page elements, such that even the simple word “hello” is really just 5 unrelated page elements, not the humanly discernable word “hello” … there’s not even a find or search-and-replace for anything, not for user-perceived humanly-readable content, not for internal PDF page elements ( even Word has a graphics search feature ).
Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor has absolutely no sophisticated intelligence, not for PDF structures, and not for content as perceived by a reader.
I experience Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor as raw tools for programmers, not even up to Adobe Acrobat standards of even a decade ago, such that I would not even consider using this to audit the flow of a PDF for subsequent screen-readers.
No analogy is fully illuminating, but my best attempt is that if we were, say, looking for a tour guide and driving instructor to help us explore and navigate some sight-seeing around the countryside, this would be equivalent to someone responding to our request by handing us an all-purpose hand-tool kit and saying “this is for disassembling and reassembling a car” … wha? Yeah, Soft-Xpansion is that severely disjointed from understanding what we want to do.
No, Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor
– cannot edit PDF content,
– does not even have a find or search-and-replace feature,
– converts sentence content to tab-delimited words,
– has no idea how humans read and understand words connected to each other in the context of sentences and paragraphs, oh my.
And I guess that is why no one has shared their experience of this software – no one can actually figure out what to do with it, or what it does that is of any value.
Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor has no value.
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Yes, in spite of all that, Soft-Xpansion treats it as if it were some kind of valuable treasure, as if someone would want to pirate it – perhaps a good review is to see if anyone shares something over peer-to-peer torrents, and if not, then that’s a clue to it’s lack of value.
We can see that Soft-Xpansion so severely treasures their software, that they make it almost impossible to explore it let alone use it, at [ https :// soft-xpansion. com/support/ra/ ] see their stringent ( paraphrase ) “… uninstall it from an old computer and note the uninstall code, but if you can’t uninstall it, email us with the license code and ask for permission and we’ll see if it can be installed again …”
Yeah, even if you’re staring at your own property, your own backup of your own installation masters, and your computer crashes, so you walk over to your other computer, or repair your own computer, maybe such that it “looks” different to Soft-Xpansion, such as swapping the system board but using the same hard drive to reboot ( I walk boot drives among my varied and disparate Dell computers and only need one or two reboots to have them settle down as fully functional on the next hardware, no reinstallation of any software or licensing necessary ), so, no, you cannot actually use your precious purchase of Soft-Xpansion software or the installation resource without awaiting yet another email roundabout with Soft-Xpansion assessing if you are worthy of permission to use your own purchased installation again, please wait for a verdict, and please wait for a new license file, but install it first so there is a computer code to share with Soft-Xpansion, but you cannot use your instllation after installation because, well, just because, so nya nya nya, we’re watching you, you’re not using our software without permission, are you?
Can you imagine getting into any car and having it say “… license and registration please, and letter of permission from the owner, we need the owner to certify they are the owner, too, and we need you to unregister driving all other cars, and the owner must certify they have no other cars, and have deregistered all other cars, and this is the only car that you and or the owner will be driving … please wait, we’re thinking of letting you drive, maybe well get back to you when we feel like it, just be patient and wait, you did not have anything else important to do with your time, we are more important than you, that’s why we have your money, and you do not, sukka …” … or somthin’ like that from Soft-Xpansion.
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Some of you may wonder why I have all this energy over this, why bother?
There are a handful of reasons beyond the entertainment value.
I value our fellow SOS participants, and I want us to get the best experience possible here at SOS, so
– I share my experience, hoping others get advantage from it,
– I prod the vendors to step up to serve us all, to serve us well,
– I share alternatives when I find them, so we all can at least get something installed, and working, to accomplish what we came here for.
I have nagged other vendors, and some have evolved and taken advantage of my shared hard-wrought insights ( Peter Norton, Google Picasa, Codusiv Diskeeper, Sony, and others ), and some vendors turned away ( Steve Gibson, Epson, Minolta, Apple, and others ), I wish them all the greatest success, especially for the greatest success for their customers and former customers, and if they miss some customers, if they become misaligned with my own priorities, that happens, and we move in separate directions, untethered, but at least I offered, at least I tried.
Some folks simply say “… what, no lifetime license, I can’t reinstall it, well then, I’m not even downloading today’s offer …” and they move on, we never hear anything more form them.
I like to think out loud ( obviously ) and I’m grateful for all of us readers and correspondents, regardless of the apparent tussle of viewpoints, and for those wondering why any thread here at SOS wastes everyone’s time going to 3 pages, they can just scroll on, no harm was done, it’s all recyclable electrons over the Internet.
Thanks for letting me explore this and share.
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