A Consuming Experience: June 2011

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

How to remove Nuance PDF reader from Firefox (& short review)

If like some people you install the free Nuance PDF reader, then uninstall it but it's still taking over PDFs in Firefox, here is how I got rid of it. It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

Try these steps (screenshots are from Firefox 4):

In Firefox find your Plugins - in Firefox go to menu Tools, Add-ons (or in the address bar type about:addons and hit Enter), then on the left click Plugins
In the Plugins list, look for all PDF plugins that are NOT "Adobe Acrobat" - in my case the culprit was DocuCom PDF Plus rather than Nuance, go figure. Click the Disable button for that plugin, so that it now gets greyed out and has "(disable)" after its name:
Do this for each non-Adobe PDF plugin. Make sure you scroll down to the end of the plugins list to disable all non-Adobe PDF plugins.
You may also have to disable and then enable the standard Adobe plugin, again go figure but I had to before it would work.
Restart Firefox, just for luck. And hopefully now PDFs will open using Adobe Reader instead of Nuance.

Nuance PDF Reader

Why did I decide against Nuance's free PDF reader? I want to make it clear that I do love their Dragon Dictation app for the iPhone, which is remarkably accurate and quick (and, generously, free).

However, their PDF reader, although it's quite fast, insists on defaulting to the hand tool when I open a PDF, whereas I need it to default to Select to copy/paste text etc.

More importantly, when I rightclick on a PDF in Firefox, Nuance won't show me the document Properties, which I need in order to check the publication date of some PDFs.

There may be a way to change its settings to do what I need, but it's not obvious, and I've not had the time to find it - whereas Adobe defaults to what I need, so I may as well go back to that.

Saturday, 4 June 2011

Convert files free, online - PDF to Word DOC, etc - review of tool

ConvertFiles.com, which I've just discovered, is a very useful online tool, especially to convert Adobe Acrobat PDFs to editable word processing documents eg Microsoft Word DOC format.

You just give the website the URL of a file (starting with http, https, ftp), or you can upload a local file, and it will automatically recognise the file type and offer you a choice of suitable formats into which it can be converted.

Tip: sometimes it won't recognise PDF files where the URL doesn't end in .pdf - so in that situation just download the file and upload it from your computer.

There's a decent range of formats available (see lists below).

Speed - you can download the converted file quite quickly, even for big files.

Maximum file size limits - it will accept files of up to a very generous 200 MB.

OCR - it will even do OCR (optical character recognition) of image files, ie convert scans of images etc to editable text - and, though they don't mention this (they should!), that includes PDF scans, I tried some.

It converted a massive PDF scan beautifully into an editable Word document, with very few errors.

What's more, it's all free, although in gratitude I've checked out some of their advertisers!

Supported formats and conversions

From their FAQs, here's their full list of supported conversions:

DOCUMENT

DOCX to DOC, ODT, RTF, SWX, TXT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
DOC to ODT, RTF, SWX, TXT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
ODT to DOC, RTF, SWX, TXT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
RTF to ODT, DOC, SWX, TXT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
SXW to ODT, RTF, DOC, TXT, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
TXT to ODT, RTF, SWX, DOC, HTML, XHTML, PDF, PDB, ZIP
ODS to XLS, CSV, RTF, PDF, HTML, ZIP
XLS to ODS, CSV, PDF, HTML, ZIP
XLSX to XLS, ODS, CSV, PDF, HTML, ZIP
PDF to DOC, PNG, JPG
XPS to PDF
CHM to PDF, EPUB, FB2, MOBI, LIT, TXT
PAGES to PDF

PRESENTATION

ODP to PPT, PDF, SWF
PPT to ODP, PDF, SWF
PPTX to PPT, ODP, SWF, PDF

E-BOOK

EPUB to FB2, MOBI, LIT, PDF, TXT
FB2 to MOBI, LIT, EPUB, PDF, TXT
MOBI to EPUB, FB2, LIT, PDF, TXT
LIT to EPUB, FB2, MOBI, PDF, TXT
PRC to EPUB, FB2, MOBI, PDF, TXT, LIT

DRAWING

ODG to PDF, JPG, PNG, SWF
DXF to PDF, JPG, PNG, SWF
DWG to PDF, JPG, PNG

IMAGES, PICS, PHOTOS

BMP to GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF, ZIP, PDF
GIF to BMP, JPG, PNG, TIF, PDF
JPG to GIF, BMP, PNG, TIF, PDF
PNG to GIF, JPG, BMP, TIF, PDF
TIF to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, ZIP, PDF

OCR

BMP to DOC, TXT, RTF
GIF to DOC, TXT, RTF
JPG to DOC, TXT, RTF
PNG to DOC, TXT, RTF
TIF to DOC, TXT, RTF

AUDIO

AAC to WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, FLAC, AU, WMA, AMR
AMR to WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, AAC, FLAC, AU, M4A
AU to WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, AAC, FLAC, AMR, M4A
FLAC to WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, AAC, AU, WMA, AMR
M4A to WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, AAC, FLAC, AU, AMR
MP3 to WAV, OGG, AAC, M4A, FLAC, AU, WMA, AMR
OGG to WAV, MP3, AAC, M4A, FLAC, AU, WMA, AMR
WAV to MP3, OGG, AAC, M4A, FLAC, AU, WMA, AMR
WMA to WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, AAC, FLAC, AU, AMR
MKA to WAV, MP3, OGG, M4A, AAC, FLAC, AU, AMR, WMA

VIDEO

3GP to AVI, MOV, WMV, M4V, MP3, JPG
AMV to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, WMV, MP3, JPG
ASF to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, WMV, MOV, AVI, M4V, MP3, JPG
AVI to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
FLV to 3GP, AVI, MP4, MPEG, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
MKV to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, WMV, MOV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
MOV to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, WMV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
M4V to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, WMV, MP3, JPG
MP4 to FLV, 3GP, AVI, MPEG, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
MPEG to AVI, 3GP, MP4, FLV, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
MPG to AVI, 3GP, MP4, FLV, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
RM to AVI, 3GP, MP4, FLV, MPEG, VOB, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
VOB to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
WMV to 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
M2T to WMV, 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
M2TS to WMV, 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG
MTS to WMV, 3GP, FLV, MP4, MPEG, AVI, VOB, MOV, MKV, ASF, M4V, MP3, JPG