Walt at Random

Never mind. After doing some more looking, reading reviews, talking to one store, and seeing a Memorial Day sale, I’ve ordered Power PDF fromNuance,  the same people who now own Dragon Naturally Speaking. At $80 (including shipping), it’s a reasonable chance to take.

Help.

Here’s the situation: I’ve pretty much entirely moved to my new PC from my old one. I’ve got Office 2013, Windows 8.1, Paint.net, most of what I need.

But…

I’d like to correct a problem I’ve had for some years. Namely, Acrobat 9 (which I do own) doesn’t integrate with recent versions of Word, at least not under Windows Vista or 7, at least on my old machine. (It appears to, but the addin doesn’t work). So, for some years now, I’ve been using Acrobat as a PDF Printer in Word when I need size compression or very high quality photos/graphics in the output, Word’s “Create PDF” when I need working hyperlinks. That’s really clumsy.

My needs are fairly straightforward in terms of going beyond Office 2013’s improved PDF facilities:

1.  Distillation when needed. (Example: the Word-generated version of the donation-only The OA Landscape 2011-2014: An Interim Subject View is roughly 8MB–but the Acrobat-as-printer version, which lacks working hyperlinks, is just over 2MB. C&I folks may note that the single-column versions, minimized for online viewing, are 2-4 times as large as the two-column print-optimized versions: that’s the Acrobat-vs-Word difference.)
2. Integration into Word would  be nice.
3. The ability to retain full 300dpi photos/graphics for high-quality Lulu books. (Word doesn’t seem to do this on save-as-PDF; Acrobat’s printer driver can be set up with options that work)
4. Ability to combine multiple PDFs into a single price.

Oh,, yes, and one more thing:A reasonable price for a non-subscription program that comes on a disc.

I don’t think I should need to pay twice as much for these capabilities as I did for Office 2013 itself. $299 strikes me as pretty high. ($14.99/month? Not gonna happen–and, again, that’s nearly twice the price of Office 365!)

Yes, I’m on a budget. So far, donations for that book/to support C&I would cover one-third of the cost stated above.

Suggestions?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2015 at 10:46 am and is filed under Technology and software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.