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[August 4, 2005]

Does ScanSoft Know PDF Better Than Adobe?

By ROBERT LIU, TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist


Does ScanSoft know the PDF file format better than Adobe? Maybe.

The speech technologies company that also operates a somewhat overshadowed imaging business on Thursday reported that its suite of PDF creation and conversion software is gaining a foothold on the office productivity market far better than it had originally expected.

The imaging business as well as "strong performance" achieved in ScanSoft's speech solutions contributed to the company last night announcing better-than-expected earnings and revenue for its most recently completed fiscal third quarter.

ScanSoft originally introduced its PDF Converter Professional3 on May 10. The application allows users to create, convert and edit PDF for just $99, far below what Adobe charges for its Acrobat PDF file manager. But in addition to functionality like security, encryption, sticky-notes and highlighting tools, ScanSoft's solution goes one step further, delivering business PDF capabilities like FormTyper, which makes any PDF form fillable with a single click, and PDF Converter, which turns existing PDF files into fully-formatted Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect documents, as well as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

"ScanSoft has quickly become the leading third-party supplier of PDF solutions targeting business users, second only to Adobe," the company said in its press statement. PDF (or the portable document format) was originally developed by Adobe in the early 1990s. The technology strips out unnecessary code from a file as well embeds fonts and graphics for easy transport of a document.

ScanSoft still plans to close its merger with Nuance Communications next month as previously announced. After which, it will operate using the Nuance name.

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet.Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg.For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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