15-Minute Reviews :: novaPDF Lite v5.2b230

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is novaPDF Lite version 5.2 build 230 by Softland – An application to create PDFs via printer driver.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“novaPDF Lite allows you to create PDF files from any printable document, including emails, MS Office documents, web pages, text. It works as a printer driver and you can print from any Windows application that supports printing – just set novaPDF Lite as the default printer and the document will be converted and saved as PDF file.”

Quick Pros

• Options are easy to set up
• Facing and Continuous Facing print options handy for book-printing
• Possible to script file handling with Run application feature
• Prints are extremely fast compared to Adobe’s setup

Quick Cons

• Lacking too many much-needed features to be vastly usable in this version
• Does not include its own viewer
• Print results from a website weren’t good

Expansion

While I use Adobe Acrobat at work, I am always looking for a good alternative. This application runs much like Adobe Acrobat in that it installs a printer driver, and it is a Postscript interpreter essentially. All the settings you need to use will be found on the Printer Preferences of any ‘Page Setup’ or ‘Print’ window in applications which support printing. The tabs are laid out in a logical format, making getting your settings set quickly and easily. There are a good number of options in this version of novaPDF including predefined and custom paper sizes, quick-set graphics resolutions and document information. There is also easy access to ‘Page layout’ including ‘Facing’ and ‘Continuous Facing’, making it easy to make book or single-fold printouts a snap. Finally, the most intriguing part is the ‘Run application’ part of ‘After save action’, making it theoretically possible to script (externally) handling of the file. Whether it be FTP it to a company website or similar, there are a lot of options with this alone.

With that said, there are some features missing from the Lite version that are critical in my opinion. My first major one I feel is missing is the inclusion of fonts and subset fonts. This feature is found in the Standard version but not the Lite version, which it should be. Essentially this means you’re not creating a true portable document, but instead forces a reliance on fonts as well. As well, while not found in this version but can be found in Professional is encryption options; For me this is a fairly important version to protect our works while we’re proofing to some clients or even to minimize chance of alteration at a later time. Finally, I do wonder at if this application does support any of the Adobe compliance standards such as PDF/X-3 – I can’t find a clear indicator within this Lite version nor notes on if Standard or Professional support this, and may be a limitation on if it would be used in some businesses. One last note; I do wonder why the author chose not to include their own version of a reader; If they could pull the speed of making the PDF with a version of reader, it would be worth that alone over the slowness of Adobe Reader.

I tested quite a few files and formats, and I was rather impressed at the print speeds. Granted, these speeds are likely in part due to the lack of font embedding, but the few times I’ve ran without font embedding in Adobe Acrobat, it still seemed slow, so I believe this one does have a speed factor. While many of my PDFs turned out well, I did find that printing web pages did fall a bit flat. As you’ll see with the demo PDF here, that at the bottom of the first page an image is cropped off, that the second page the ‘Active Giveaway time left’ phrase is pushed around and so forth. I don’t have a sample of a PDF made from another application right now, but I did do a test-print from my printer itself and it did come out better (though not flawless either) than the PDF did. I wanted to test out other fluid layout documents to see if anything without a strict page-style layout would result in the same issue.

Final Verdict

While this application shows some serious promise as an alternative to Acrobat and Distiller, I do feel that the lack of font embedding in even the Lite version is a fairly large downfall. For free, if you don’t have a PDF maker and don’t need font embedding for sending files to others, I would likely aim towards other freeware or low-cost alternatives available; One option I’ve looked at a while back was PDF995 though I can’t vouch for it specifically. As for paying $19.95 for this title; The price is just too high in my opinion for lacking font embedding specifically. Standard at $29.95 and Professional at $39.95 may be worth it as alternatives but would require testing to see if this is the case or not.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, September 17, 2007