What makes it a PDF?

Often people will ask "What is a PDF file?" or "How do you View a PDF File?". These lead to a couple of basic answers.

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DOCX is Not a Portable Document Format

We have had some customers wonder why .docx files display differently in Microsoft Office on OSX versus Office on Windows.

Fonts

Layout in all documents depends upon font metrics. There are vertical and horizontal font metrics. Even if horizontal metrics look the same, the vertical metrics can be so different that the text line with the substituted font takes more or less vertical space than it does for the original font. This affects the layout of the entire document.

Mac OSX has its own set of fonts that are not available on Windows. If you have Office installed on OSX then it also adds typical Microsoft Office fonts. The Mac has a super-set of fonts and that means that documents converted on Windows  have more chances to be displayed well on Mac than vice versa.

Windows and OSX

Microsoft Word is a word processor. While it has powerful formatting and design functionality it was never written to maintain the original document formatting for printing and viewing on multiple computer platforms. This is the purpose of PDF - Portable Document Format.

Solid PDF to Word for Mac v2 Released

We just released version 2 of Solid PDF to Word for Mac. 

Improvements in version 2 include:

* Prompt for Page Range (convert 1 page or as many pages as you need)

* PDF to PowerPoint and PDF to .csv data

* OCR languages supported include English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish

*Improved OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

* We continuously use your PDFs to improve our conversion output. Get all the latest updates

* Simplified unlocking from the application menu

Mountain Lion support with this version. We support OS X v10.6, v10.7 and v10.8

Download version 2 (free 15 day trial, fully functional but we watermark output)

Virus checkers, valid software blocked and hangs...

We have been hearing from our customers that Norton and Symantec our quarantining parts of our version 8 applications. Why would anti-virus software block applications that do not contain malware or viruses?

Symantec and other anti-virus software companies use detection techniques to try and determine if something might harm your computer. Based on certain attributes that they decide, they quarantine or block applications from running if their tools believe your software may cause harm. These detection techniques also make mistakes and can block clean software applications from running.

What does this look like for Solid Documents software?

Software Hangs at Start

Run Solid Converter v8 or Solid PDF Tools v8 and you see the splash screen and then the cursor just spins and spins and spins. Hopefully you see your anti-virus software pop up a notice that it has blocked one of our services. The potential services that could get blocked:

SolidFramework.JobHandler.exe
SolidScanServiceX86.exe
SolidScanServiceX64.exe

Microsoft Word Addin Gets Quarantined

We add a toolbar ribbon to Microsoft Word with version 8. This can also get blocked and quarantined by Symantec or other anti-virus checkers. You will see a message that SolidWordAddin.dll has been quarantined.

Our software is safe and free of any malware or adware. We use code signing certificates to mark our software from Solid Documents. You can trust the software you download from our website. When you install you will always see our company name when Windows verifies that you trust the provider of the software you are trying to install.

Fortunately Symantec has a way to report these false-positive quarantines to get us off their list. We have submitted our software for review to them and they have white-listed our software. Now they have to push out the definitions that include our software to all their users. We will pro-actively continue to ask for Symantec (and Norton) to white-list our releases to try and eliminate these false-positive reports from happening and hindering your use of our software.

If you ever have questions regarding our software, please email us at support@soliddocuments.com. If other anti-virus checkers are blocking our software please let us know.