CJK plus Greek OCR Support

We have released new versions of Solid PDF Tools, Solid Converter Mac and Solid Commander that include optical character recognition (OCR) for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Greek.

This OCR support was added using Tessaract OCR. Tesseract is an optical character recognition engine for various operating systems. 

Solid PDF Tools download:
http://www.soliddocuments.com/download.htm?product=SolidPDFTools

Solid Commander download:
http://www.soliddocuments.com/download.htm?product=SolidCommander

Solid Converter Mac download:
http://www.mac-pdf-converter.com/download-pdf-to-word

In addition, Solid OCR includes high quality optical character recognition in 14 languages (English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish , Swedish and Turkish) for reconstructing scanned pages as editable documents.

Version 9 - Scanning - WIA and TWAIN support

Question: What scanner support is included with Solid PDF Tools v9?

Answer: We have added WIA support into version 9 as too many customers only had WIA support for their scanning devices. Now you can choose between TWAIN and WIA. We also pop up the manufacturer's device scanning dialog so you can use all the features that your particular scanner supports.

Scanner Drivers: TWAIN or WIA

TWAIN and WIA are standards for communicating with imaging devices - scanners, in our case, and software applications.

"The word 'twain' is an archaic form meaning 'two'. It appears in Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West' - '... and never the twain shall meet ...', reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry 'Technology Without An Interesting Name' continues to haunt the standard." - from Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

TWAIN drivers are provided by your scanner's manufacturer (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, etc.). When you run Solid Converter it discovers what TWAIN drivers you have installed so it can talk to your scanning devices.

WIA (Windows Imaging Acquistion) is from Microsoft and is an utility that allows you to scan into any application that supports WIA.

Version 9 is available

Solid Documents has just released version 9 of all our Windows software products:

Desktop Software:

Solid Converter v9
Solid PDF Tools v9
Solid PDF/A Express v9
Solid PDF to Word v9
Solid Scan to Word v9

Process Automation:
Solid Automator v9
Solid Commander v9

Free, fully functional trials are available on our website.

Changes

New features include File | Print, Search and a new scanner interface (supporting TWAIN and WIA drivers). 

We continue to focus on improvements to our industry leading PDF conversion engine, OCR and overall document reconstruction process. 

PDF Files - Converting to Word

Question: When I convert a PDF file to a Word document not all of the characters are correct.  Why does this happen?

Answer: Not all PDFs are made the same way.

PDFs - you can say there are basically two types of PDF files - scanned from paper and created on a computer.

Scanned PDFs - pages are images. OCR (optical character recognition) has to look at all the dots of ink and figure out what is what.

Based on patterns our software tries to determine characters, images, font, etc. Some dots can be noise or can be diacritics. We try to figure this out as best we can. Quality of scan and font type certainly affect analysis and success of detection. 

Computer generated PDFs - usually these types of PDFs include font information (PDFs are built with mapping/encoding details, they do not include characters, words, sentences, paragraphs, headers/footers, details). We figure all this stuff out and reconstruct the document with structure. Some PDF creators do not use standard encoding so we have to again do some detective work to try and determine what is in the PDF. If the font has been computer generated and we have details included in the PDF and the computer you convert to Microsoft Word has the same font installed, then you should get these other fonts in the Word file. For example, we convert CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) PDFs that have been computer generated into correct Word documents.

Fonts - if we have the information from the PDF or we determine the language/font and it includes diacritics we use the correct characters for the font/language. We have done a lot of work to support foreign languages with our OCR and again, with our standard PDF conversion software.

Forcing OCR on computer generated PDFs - turning on text recovery for all characters and pages forces all PDFs through our OCR processing which is not the best solution. With non-standard encoded documents it can provide a better conversion, but if your PDF is a standard computer generated one then our default document reconstruction processing is best.

Scanners ...TWAIN... WIA...

Question: What is TWAIN and WIA? What does this have to do with Solid Converter v8?

Answer: TWAIN and WIA are standards for communicating with imaging devices - scanners, in our case, and software applications.

"The word 'twain' is an archaic form meaning 'two'. It appears in Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West' - '... and never the twain shall meet ...', reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was up-cased to TWAIN to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym, and then to a contest to come up with an expansion. None were selected, but the entry 'Technology Without An Interesting Name' continues to haunt the standard." - from Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

TWAIN drivers are provided by your scanner's manufacturer (Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, etc.). When you run Solid Converter it discovers what TWAIN drivers you have installed so it can talk to your scanning devices.

WIA (Windows Imaging Acquistion) is from Microsoft and is an utility that allows you to scan into any application that supports WIA.

Solid Converter v8 only uses TWAIN as its interface to scanning devices.

If you scanner does not support TWAIN you can use the software supplied with your scanner to scan your paper documents. Save the scanned images as tiff and then create a PDF using Create PDF with Solid Converter.

v8 has New User Interface

v8 includes a new and improved user interface where the core tasks are easily available.

Solid PDF Tools v8 User Interface

The v8 rewrite was a conscious shift back to our core features : a focus on document reconstruction functionality. 

Adding new features to the product going forward is prioritized by customer requests so please send your feedback to support@soliddocuments.com.

The v8 rewrite was required to take advantage of 64-bit architectures and multi-core processors. A rewrite using Microsoft .NET was required so that we could engineer the product using our own Solid Framework SDK (unlike the older products which were based on a legacy architecture).

Watch our getting started video.

New Version 8 Available

We have released version 8!

Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools helps you improve, create and convert PDFs into Word and Excel in addition to other file formats, resulting in accurate, high quality documents that are easy to reuse. 

Included in this version 8 release are two process automation applications: Solid Automator and Solid Commander. Solid Documents has also released three new applications with specific functionality: Solid PDF to Word, Solid Scan to Word and Solid PDF/A Express.

"The v8 rewrite was a conscious shift back to our core features : a focus on document reconstruction functionality" said Michael Cartwright, CEO of Solid Documents. "The v8 rewrite was required to take advantage of 64-bit architectures and multi-core processors. A rewrite using Microsoft .NET was required so that we could engineer the products using our own Solid Framework SDK (unlike the older products which were based on a legacy architecture)."

Getting started videos are available, along with other product feature tutorials.

Solid Converter PDF 7.3 Released

Solid Documents has just released version 7.3 of Solid Converter PDF and Solid PDF Tools. Improvements in version 7.3 include:

• Solid OCR (optical character recognition) now supports 8 languages (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish).
• PDF to Word: heading/style detection, table of contents reconstruction, hierarchical list reconstruction.
• Complete rework of PDF to PowerPoint reconstruction including transitions, master slides and PowerPoint specific layout engine.
• Great improvements to PDF to HTML conversion to take advantage of table of contents reconstruction and style detection. Single page output with navigation frame or multiple linked HTML pages for navigation.

Download Solid Converter PDF - 15 day fully functional trial version (we only watermark output while in trial mode)
Download Solid PDF Tools

Available in 13 Languages

At Solid Documents our focus is to provide you with excellent tools that enhance your ability to produce high-quality documents. We build software that helps you create, convert, translate or publish electronic or paper documents, quickly and simply.

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Solid PDF Tools v6 Now Available

Solid Documents has released version 6 of Solid PDF Tools, our popular PDF creation, conversion and archiving software. With Solid PDF Tools you can:

• Convert PDFs to PDF/A
• Validate PDF/A
• Convert PDF to MS Word
• Convert PDFs to HTML
• Convert PDFs to Text
• Convert PDF Tables to Excel
• Scan directly to MS Word
• Create PDF Bookmarks from Office
• And much more!

Per specifications from the PDF/D Consortium, version 6 now exports PDF/A validation and conversion reports. The validator and converter have also been improved to:

• provide support for XMP validation
• pass 100% of the Bavaria Test Suite cases (v5 already passed the Isartor cases)

With the improvements to our PDF/A technology, we believe version 6 is now one of the best PDF/A tools availabe on the market today. This PDF/A functionality is also available to both .NET and C++ developers through our Solid Framework SDK product.

Scan to Microsoft® Word

Solid PDF Tools offers powerful scanning features that allow users to scan multiple pages directly into one or more Word documents.

Scanning a paper document produces an image file. In order to create an editable Word document Solid PDF Tools needs to convert the images of letters into text characters. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature in Solid PDF Tools does this.

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