What’s your point, [@Gary]?
Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor
– failed to come on screen for some of us,
– even in trial mode,
– and the vendor has still not replied to our emails ( yet ).
__________
Features and benefits wise, the program appears to be not very special or smart.
I chose a free PDF to explore, a PDF direct from the publisher via a local free library electronic archive, a PDF I already had in my posession, a PDF by the publisher that contains direct text, not OCR from an scanned image, the PDF was not independently converted from another document type to PDF.
You chose a PDF that was generated ( their word, ask the Gutenberg project to explain ), independently converted from another document type, a PDF from a list that included a text version ( hence no need to export PDF-to-text, the text version is “clean” of interruptive page numbers, footers, and headers, in the middle of sentences ).
Regardless, Soft-xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor export to text results for both of us were unaware of the human-perceived meaning of the contents.
You accept that without comment.
I do not accept that, and commented that it would take 300+ pages of editing to eliminate the debris, suggesting alternatively cropping the pages to their content minus the marginalia before exporting, or programming macros in Word-equivalent to clean up debris, or some other such scheme.
Or opening any PDF in any PDF reader, like free Google Chrome, and highlighting the text, and then copying-and-pasting, which works fine for both of our PDF samples – who needs an export function in a PDF reader, especially if it is even less intelligent than simple copy-and-paste?
Here’s a sample of cut and paste from “The Boy Electrician” generated PDF across 2 page numbers, why waste your time when a clean text version is immediately available side-by-side at the Gutenberg website that has no page number interruptions in the middle of sentences?
by comparing the force which gravity exerts in pulling it to the earth with the
same effect of gravity on another standard ”weight.”
Electric current is invisible and weightless, and for these and other reasons
cannot be measured by the quart or weighed by the pound. The only way that
it can be measured is by means of some of the effects which it produces. Either
the chemical, electro-magnetic, or the heating effects may be made the basis of a
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system of measurement.
The first method used to measure electric current was the chemical one.
If a current is passed through a solution of a chemical called coppersulphate
(blue vitriol) by means of two copper plates, copper will be deposited on one plate
and dissolved from the other. If the current is furnished by a battery the copper
will be deposited on the plate connected with the zinc of the battery. If the current
is allowed to flow for a short time and the two copper plates are then taken out
and weighed it will be found that one plate is considerably heavier than the other.
The copper has been taken from one plate and deposited on the other by the
electric currents. The amount of electric current which will deposit 1.177 grammes
of copper in an hour is called an ampere. The ampere is the unit of electrical
current measurement, and implies quantity or amount.
The chemical method of measuring current was at one time put to practical
service in the distribution of electric current for lighting and power. Many years
ago the house meters, used to measure the current, consisted of a jar containing
two copper plates. The current used in the house would cause copper to deposit
on one plate, and by weighing the plate the power company could determine
the amount of current used, and thereby the amount of the bill. The meters
nowadays make use of the magnetic effects of the current instead of the chemical,
as described later on.
The Volt
For purposes of explanation the electric current may be likened to a stream of
water flowing through a pipe.
If you hold your thumb over the end of a water-pipe through which water
is flowing it will push your thumb away because of the pressure which the water
exerts.
Electric currents also exert a pressure, only it is not called pressure in electrical parlance, but, spoken of as electromotive force or potential.
The pressure of the water enables it to pass through small openings and to
overcome the resistance offered by the pipe.
Wires and other electrical conductors do not offer a perfectly free path to
an electric current, but also possess a resistance. It is the potential of the electromotive force which overcomes the resistance and pushes the current through the
wire.
Advantage has been taken of the fact to fix a unit of electrical pressure
called the volt. The pressure of the water in a water-pipe is measured in pounds,
but the pressure of an electric current in a wire is measured by volts. The volt
is the unit of electrical force which will cause a current of one ampere to flow
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through a resistance of one ohm.
The Ohm
The ohm is the unit of electrical resistance. The standard ohm is the resistance
offered by a column of pure mercury having a section of one square millimeter
and a length of 106.28 centimeters at a temperature of 0° centigrade.
The pressure which will force sufficient current through such a column of
mercury to deposit 1.177 grammes of copper in one hour is a volt, and in doingNo tab spaces between words, line endings meaningless, page numbers in the middle of sentences.
You don’t mind, I do.
Not-free Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor is not needed, free Google Chrome works just fine to export text from a PDF above, plus, as noted, a much cleaner text version was already immediately available right next to the PDF.
Why do you think that your speculating that Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor exports each character as it finds it, is superior speculation to my speculation that it converts code from within a PDF to whatever the programmers told it to convert, including non-printing internal PDF codes?
By the way, free Google Chrome exported text from a PDF of “An Elegant Defense” book by Matt Richtel much faster, easier, and more usefully accurately via cut-and-paste, WITHOUT TAB DELIMITING BETWEEN WORDS, compared to Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor’s text export.
Yeah, free Google Chrome is better.
As I wrote, Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor appears to be a capable program, at least as capable as a 10-year-old version of Adobe Acrobat Pro MINUS OCR, PLUS QUIRKS, and as such probably can be useful for direct editing of a PDF … and that makes it not special, not competitive, not contemporary, not trustworthy ( the quirks ), but of someone has no other PDF editor, it’s better than nothing ( except free Google Chrome for neater cleaner faster text export, apparently ).
That the company has been in business for 25 years is meaningless, and does not mean they are appropriate for any one of us, as I have already commented, if their customers are corporate PDF generators, not end users like us who have unidentified PDFs arriving from all over the place and in any condition, we probably need PDF editors with sophisticated intelligence that have more of a chance of auditing a PDF for a variety of reasons, to convert to black-and-white, to make as small as possible, to perform OCR optical character recognition, to crop all scanned pages to the same dimensions around the content, to trim off marginalia in preparation for text export without page numbers, headers, and footers in the way of the text, and so on.
Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor is NOT it.
Nor has the company overcome the first three failures:
– failed to come on screen for some of us,
– even in trial mode,
– and the vendor has still not replied to our emails ( yet ).
But, hey, [@Gary], if you want to discuss unicode and ignore a readily available properly formatted text file staring at you from the same web page where a generated PDF has worse text, go right ahead, none of that has anything to do with Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor, or SOS, or me.
PS – I have found a freely available epub version of “An Elegant Defense” book by Matt Richtel as released direct from the publisher, so my text export from the PDF is now just an exercise to be deleted.
Thanks for exploring this and sharing.
.