Everybody needs to convert files from one format to the other from time to time. Luckily there are a lot of ways to accomplish this. One option I have just checked out is called Universal Document Converter.
In short, this product installs as a virtual print driver under Windows (sorry, Mac or Linux users). It allows you to print anything to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PCX, DCX, GIF or BMP. Probably where this would get the most use is when printing a Word document to PDF or when trying to convert a PDF to an image format.
I installed the freely available trial version. It will run indefinitely, but it will install a pretty large and annoying watermark onto anything that you print. The installation was nice and easy and, within a minute, I was able to run a test by printing off a webpage directly from Firefox. By default, it saves the resulting file to the “UDC Output Files” directory directly off your C drive. You can, however, change this in the Properties for the print driver. If you want it to ask you where to put it every time, you can also set this as an option.
The resulting prints are, as expected, true to form accurate depictions of what I printed.
The product most definitely does what it is supposed to do. The underlying question in my mind would be this: Do you really need this software?
Universal Document Converter runs $69 for a single user license, with volume discounts the more you buy. This certainly isn’t cheap for a virtual printer driver. Plus, there are free options available such as PDFCreator if PDF printing is your first priority. Printing to image formats is not nearly as easy to accomplish if you are trying to remain on the free side of things so it is in this arena where I see the most potential for this software. They have several tutorials available on how to run the various conversions.
Printing a document to an image format is probably something most home users won’t have a need for. However, it is not uncommon in enterprise environments where image formats are used for archival purposes for documents or for printing situations where you cannot have any alteration at all (we’ve all seen documents print differently at times than the way they appear on screen). It can also come in handy if you need to send a document to somebody without them being able to make any changes to it.
In that light, Universal Document Converter looks to be a nice option for the person who needs a quick and easy way to convert a document to a lossless file format, whether it be for archive or print purposes. It isn’t for everybody, but for the person who needs it it is a huge time saver.
NOTE: The preceding review was a paid review.
David Risley is the founder of PCMech.com. He is the brains, the thinker, the writer, the nerd.
Interesting that; I wish I’d heard about it a long time ago. I use Solid Converter – ( http://www.soliddocuments.com/products.htm?product=SolidConverterPDF ) -to make .PDFs from M$ Word. (.rtf, .doc, .docx, .htm, .html, etc)I have the paid-for registered version which costs somewhere around half the price of the program above. If I ever do need to make a .bmp, .jpg, or .gif from Word or .pdf, which is hardly ever, I just print it out and then scan it in with my aging Canoscan FB620U. It’s hassle but it works.
As I said I wish I’d have invested in the program you mentioned nevertheless, as scanning in is never as good or as tidy as true electronic conversion on the rare occasions I’ve done so.
You will receive really worse-quality image file if you print the document on desktop printer and then scan the printed copy to JPEG or TIFF.
Plus, “color noise” you receive from scanner make the size of JPEG or TIFF file larger that if you will print the document directly to the image using software like this Universal Document Converter.