[@Peter Blaise]

As for me stating that it is worth it, I have mentioned that I have been using the PDF export to text feature. I also have used it to do several other things. I am writing about these one-at-a-time in my review, which I hope to have finished soon. I don’t like everything about the program, which is why I wanted to see what Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11 does with its Export to text in Unicode encoding.

1) You have shown us that you were able to export to Text; even though you did not understand the output, at least you were able to successfully activate the program, otherwise, you would not be able to export to Text at all.

2) You have stated that an alternative is Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11.

Therefore, I am asking how does the output from Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11 differ from what you got with Perfect PDF 9 for export to text with Unicode encoding. That should be a simple enough test to do and paste the results into a comment. I look forward to seeing how this one feature compares.

[@Peter Blaise]

It is great that you have found other PDF editors you can compare to Perfect PDF 9. The more the merrier. It will be interesting to see what the others produce for the Export to Text as Unicode encoding.

My review is dependent on knowing as much as all the alternatives as possible but I don’t have other PDF editors installed, and the one I use does not export to text using Unicode encoding, so for me, Perfect PDF 9 has been a welcome tool, and to get it free from Sharewareonsale has been the best price.

Since I know you already have Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11, it seemed like a simple task to see what it produces when it exports to text using Unicode encoding. At least you can knock that one away. Then later, see what the others do and report on them too.

[@Peter Blaise]

>”Yeah, that’s not gonna happen”

Oh, it’s gonna happen alright, only that you are not the person that will be doing it now. You had a chance to show what Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11 does but will not do it. Since that would be an easy test, I am beginning to think you must already know what the Text export looks like. So whether it can export to text/Unicode better than Perfect PDF 9 is a piece my review is missing. In that case, I have a solution. I didn’t want to have any other PDF editors installed, but I will get Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11 and do the test myself, even if I have to purchase a license for the program. Your source is one of those that push the user into a “get it fast” for money, or “get it slow” for free downloads. I had rather not bother. Ashampoo has a special on the earlier versions anyway.

If Ashampoo PDF Pro v1.11 cannot export to text, then it cannot be considered an alternative PDF editor to Perfect PDF 9 (as you claimed).

>”you try text-exporting a PDF book with a numbered table of contents yourself, and see if Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor decides it’s a spreadsheet and separates every word with tab-equivalent spaces, and share the results as I have”

Perfect PDF 9 Editor does not “decide it’s a spreadsheet” nor “and separates every word with tab-equivalent spaces.” That is not what “export to text” means.

>”I used a PDF of “An Elegant Defense” book by Matt Richtel”

All of the online sources I found for the book (“An Elegant Defense” book by Matt Richtel”) require a membership to download, which I am not interested in doing. The alternative is to purchase the electronic form of the book in PDF format for around $33, which I am not interested in doing just to test the same book you were using.

Instead, I chose something from the Gutenberg project that is free for anyone, and it is more complicated than the book you used. Not all the books available for download at the Gutenberg Project are in the PDF format, but some are. Those that are may or may not have images. I chose one that has a table of contents and a list of figures, plus the content of the book and the images. I cannot imagine anything more complicated than the one I chose.

The book I chose is “The Boy Electrician by Alfred Powell Morgan.” It is available in several formats. To get a complicated PDF file, I chose the “Generated PDF (with images)” edition. The book can be easily read as a PDF in any PDF viewer. This choice is a good one; if anyone else wants to do the same test, they will not have to shell out money to do so.

I have already done the export using Perfect PDF 9 as mentioned several times but I have not published the actual document because I do not have the rights to do so with the source I was using. The export to text was exactly what would be expected. I now have “The Boy Electrician by Alfred Powell Morgan.” book that I can use.

Soft Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 has two methods to export to text. If you choose from the Add-Ins Ribbon menu, you can select any number of PDF files (the file you have open already will not be included unless you add it to the list). When you have the list completed, you need to select a folder for output. The dialog that is used is the one that forces the user to start at the root and browse down to a specific folder. Once selected, the user is returned to Perfect PDF 9. Clicking the Next button starts the process. It does not tell the user what encoding will be used.

You can also use the File Save-As option to save the current file you have open as text. As part of that method, you can also add files if you want to export multiples. You do need to select the location to save the exported data, but the method is different in that it uses the common File Save As dialog. In the dialog, just below where you specify the name, there is an encoding choice. It states Unicode. Even though it is a pull-down menu, Unicode is the only choice.

Therefore, we know from the program that it exports Unicode text.

You have described the data “exported to text” as having “tab-delimited separate words in a text file” and “what appear to be tabs spaces between words” and now have changed your description of the text export as containing “tab-equivalent spaces.” There is no such thing as “tab-equivalent spaces” so you are describing your interpretation from sight (your interpretation of what it is) without knowing exactly what it is, even after I have explained that it is Unicode encoded text.

When describing your export experience, you mentioned that the page numbers were in the middle of sentences.

These clearly clarify that you do not know what “exported to text” means or what the output looks like when viewed with a text viewer or a hex viewer. You are expecting the output to be formatted like the source it came from. That happens only if you have a feature that exports to a document format that supports formatting, such as an MS Word document. Perfect PDF 9 does not do that. It is not a conversion tool.

When a PDF is exported to text, there is no formatting. Any text characters are written to the output when they are encountered in the source. Therefore, if a page number is found in the middle of the text that represents a sentence, then yes, it will look like the text output is not formatted, … because it isn’t supposed to be. It is just the text … that is all.

EXPORT as TEXT

When I exported the book using the Soft Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 editor, I got exactly what I expected to get … the text in Unicode.

It depends on what program you use to view the exported output that can affect whether you think the export is correct or not, but regardless of what you choose to view the output, you cannot make an accurate determination of what encoding was used. If you do not already know, you have to use some tool to investigate the text. There are several programs that will investigate a data file and give the encoding. These are very common on Linux systems, less common on the Windows platform, but I also have a good way for the Windows platform using a common program.

If you try some of the Word-equivalent editors, some may be able to open the file, others will not be able to. You never stated exactly what Word-equivalent editor you used, so I have no way of doing an exact comparison. Some Word-equivalent editors do not have the ability to recognize the Unicode text so it cannot open the file. For example, LibreOffice Writer throws up a dialog stating that the file is corrupt but asks if LibreOffice should try to fix it. If allowed to try and fix it, LibreOffice displays a second dialog stating that it cannot fix it, and therefore cannot open the file. That is good because otherwise, LibreOffice would be corrupting a file that was not corrupt to begin with.

A good text editor that understands different encodings will likely show the Unicode characters in two bytes, so naturally, they will appear to be separated by a space (this is why you cannot determine the encoding just by looking at the contents). It isn’t a space the editor is showing; it simply is the high-order bits, which do not represent characters in the 128 or 256 character sets we commonly see onscreen as Windows 1252 (often incorrectly referred to as ANSI) or UTF-8 encodings. The editor is showing the entire character as Unicode so, in the case of an English language text, it uses 2 bytes to show each character. Unicode is not limited to using only 2 bytes, but can also use 3 or 4 bytes. Due to the many different languages/characters in the world, more than 2 bytes are needed to have all of them represented. Unicode is very common in Europe.

If you use Microsoft Notepad to open the file, it depends on what encoding Notepad was using for the file opened before this one that affects how it displays the data. In many cases, the previous file likely would have been encoded as Windows 1252 (often incorrectly referred to as ANSI) or as UTF-8. The Open dialog will show the encoding that was used for the previous file. If it shows ANSI or UTF-8 or anything that is not Unicode, notice how that changes when you click on the Perfect PDF 9 exported text. It will instantly change to Unicode, but when the file contents are displayed, you may see that the characters all seem to be right next to each other or they may appear to have spaces before each character.

If shown all together, you do not see what you referred to as the “extra space” or “tab characters” and the other variants you used to describe the contents. You will notice the page numbers (initially lowercase Roman Numerals) are right next to other text. Later on, you will see page numbers right next to other text characters. This is because (as stated already) they are added to the output as found during the export to text process.

Notepad can also show the contents with what looks like extra spaces. It depends on what encoding Notepad worked with just before opening this Unicode file.

Notepad also allows you to save the file in various encodings. If you do any saves make sure each one is named so you know what encoding you saved it as. When you do the File Save As, the Save dialog also has an encoding display. It will show you what the current encoding is. You can change it to save the file to use a different encoding.

Not all conversions to other encodings work though. In one case, you will get a warning stating that the file contains Unicode characters that will be lost if the user continues to save the file. If you get that, try looking at that file in Notepad. It will appear as a lot of garbage characters.

One of the encoding choices for Saves is the Unicode big-endian. There is also a Unicode little-endian encoding, but it is not as common, so Notepad does not use it. Since 2 bytes are necessary to display the characters, The two bytes could be saved in either of the two orders. The big-endian and little-endian affect the order of the two bytes (is the 8-bit character that we commonly know as U.S. characters on the left or on the right).

Again, depending on what the previous file was encoded with can affect how Notepad displays the file. You can get a display that shows the “extra space” before each character, so no matter what you use to display the file, it may be displayed differently by each. Always use a tool that can investigate the data to know for sure. Notepad is a great tool for determining the encoding of text files on the Windows platform.

SYNOPSIS

The final synopsis is that you were not aware that a text file can contain data that requires more than one byte for each character, or that text files can have different encodings. Guess what … it still is a text file, a text file, a text file! Yes, I said text file!

>”I’m still awaiting responses from Soft-Xpansion, should all of us who asked for the SOS offer to be fulfilled but never got a response ( “yet” ) give up by now?”

I know that you have received two per your comments. If you requested more than the two you have mentioned previously, you have not given any details. If you did request more than two, what makes you think Soft Xpansion will continue sending you activation keys?

I have tracked each person’s comments, and I see only one that initially did not have success but after receiving an e-mail response was able to activate the program. I did see someone mention they sent an e-mail to Soft Xpansion, but there is no follow-up indicating whether they received a response. I do not see any users that have said that they sent an activate by e-mail method request to Soft Xpansion but did not receive a response. Therefore, there is no reason to speculate that they did not receive a response. When most people receive their response, they will activate the program, but not necessarily make any comments about it.

If you can point to a single comment that is still waiting for a response from Soft Xpansion, please do so. Maybe we can get them to clarify if it ever arrived because it could have arrived but the user never commented that the response was received. If anyone can identify that someone is still waiting on a response from Soft Xpansion, that would help with my review if the company itself offered an alternative to “activate via Internet” but not respond to the “activate via e-mail” method.

If anyone else sent an e-mail to Soft Xpansion but did not receive a response, they should post the details here. Otherwise, the public has no way of knowing. As far as “giving up now” each person has their own choice of how long to wait before they give up.

>”It’s not just text export. It’s everything else that Soft-Xpansion did wrong.”

Oh yeah, sure … and they have been doing it for over 25 years … successfully?

Oh, this is fun, the gift that keeps on giving, like my book clubs, where the worst books generate the most vigorous conversations.

We’re all having fun, right?
__________

Alternatives:

No, I do not offer alternatives as if I have compared them to the current offering, but only to suggest alternatives for us to explore – great that others feel engaged enough to do a one-for-one comparison, more, please … and thanks.
__________

PDF to text and Unicode versus tabs / whitespace tab equivalents:

… depends not only on the source PDF, but on the presence or lack of sophisticated intelligence of the programmers.

Scrutinizing source PDFs ignores the programmer’s ability or inability to interpret the presentation of PDF content as a human interprets the presentation.

That is, I do not care if there are invisible non-printing codes between letters or words or page elements, or if letter are stores in any particular font or unicode or multicode or bols markers for each letter versus one bald marker for an entire word or headline of multiple words.

If Soft-Xpansion programmers care, and try to make it my business, then that says possibly a variety of things, including they are selling to PDF publishing houses who are the source of their own PDFs, not end users who are dealing with PDFs from any source.

Line breaks mid sentence, and page numbers mid sentence, are only one part of the PDF-to-text presentation I shared, the most critical challenge to understand was the tab-delimiting between words.

Whether “tab” is a character or is a presentation effect accomplished by any other means does not concern me.

No, the characters were not separated as if 2 bytes instead of one, the words were separated as if laid out in spreadsheet column.

Note, I shared text output for all to inspect – look at it, it’s just cut-and-paste – and I cited the source, so go ahead and dive in, anyone who wants to explore.

I note that tab-equivalent-delimited results are unrelated to Unicode, that is, the spaces between words are variable, but exactly what is needed to align the next word with the previous row of word’s alignment, that is, a column, a spreadsheet, tab-delimited, by spaces or tabs or whatever it takes to line up the best word regardless of the length of the current word, but hey …
__________

Free resources, because, hey this is an SOS freebie thread.

I shared a source that was free to me, and not available in other formats.

“The Boy Electrician” book by Alfred Powell Morganis is freely available side by side with other freely available file formats.

The “The Boy Electrician” PDF is not original from the publisher, but was generated, the PDF is not a product of original publisher, and there is no need to export text from it.

As mentioned, an original publisher probably can purposefully insert non-printable codes that sully the PDF’s auto-conversion to text, I do not know, nor do I care.

I get free ebooks from the library, at least, some are in PDF format only, plus there are a gazillion resources out there, and the internal format is dependent on variables we cannot know, considering the various re-editing and re-formatting and “cleaning up” done between any original sources versus the copy we can get our hands on – again, I do not know, nor do I care.

My point, and I do have one, is that Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor seems to scrutinize the internal coding structures, and miss the human-interpretable presentation.

Who knows, maybe the PDF I started with has a code between words, and Soft-Xpansion honored that … it does not matter, really.
__________

Soft-Xpansion never replying to email request ( yet ):

Yes, Soft-Xpansion might have interpreted some email requests as non-legitimate, and then decided to not reply … who knows, maybe someone tripped over a power cord at their workspace and they lost some emails in process.

In the cases I experienced, they would be wrong to not respond and empower folks to try out their old software in order to get familiar with the terrific customer service capabilities of their software and of their support, and they have missed opportunities to present their software to SOS participants regardless of their reasons for not responding ( yet ).
__________

These are just tools, and if they work for anyone anytime for any purpose, great.

That is, if we can actually install them and get them working on screen.
__________

We’re having gun, right?
.

For late comers, or the hopeful, now that the official v9 SOS offer is over, there’s a trial version of Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 11 Premium at:

[ https :// soft-xpansion. com/products/perfect-pdf-11-premium/ ]

… well, not really available, we have to register with Soft-Xpansion and they email us a link to a trial download, that’s how they play it.

Note it also has the same challenges and noted throughout this thread, in that:

– prior version must be removed, uninstalled, even working full versions, all must go, just to try the new version,

– if it does not find it’s secret portal to phone home ( phoning home failed for some of us ),
then:

– it does not work in trial mode,

– any previous version also does not work because, hey, we just removed, uninstalled any previous version,

– it will not work until all of the below are satisfied, time frame up to Soft-Xpansion, not in our own control:

— we ourselves must keep separate track of and coordinate these 5 things that Soft-Xpansion does not keep track of:

— our specific email ( some of us have more than one and or help others try to install ), one email will marry one computer, one computer code, one activation number and one license file,

— our personal way of identifying our specific computer ( some of us have more than one computer or help others try to install ), one computer will marry one email, one computer code, one activation number, and one license file,

— our specific computer’s specific identification code as calculated by the Soft-Xpansion ( they do not say what computer the code applies to, so we must keep track and coordinate by our own method ), one computer code will marry one email, one computer, and one activation number,

— any specific Soft-Xpansion activation number ( again, tethered to a specific email and a specific computer by Soft-Xpansion’s identification, and tethered to a specific computer by our own identification method ), one activation number will marry one email, one computer, one computer code, and one license file,

— a specific license file sent to us ( some of us never got one ) for our specific computer and our specific activation number, one license file will marry one email, one computer, one computer code, and one activation number.

Yeah, Soft-Xpansion is outdoing even Franzis!

Please, let us know if you try, and please let us know how it works, and what you think, especially comparatively.
.

Excelente aplicación

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
94
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
95
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 doing

No 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.
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