Review: gDoc Fusion

Global Graphics' gDoc Fusion is an application for creating and editing documents in Adobe's PDF and Microsoft's XPS formats. It is designed for ease of use, and focuses on making common tasks simple rather than providing the entire range of features found in tools such as Acrobat Professional.

Available to download now, the gDoc line-up consists of two tools: gDoc Creator, which simply converts files between formats; and the fully-featured gDoc Fusion that integrates gDoc Creator but also allows users to drag-and-drop pages between files and edit the contents.

Users can download the tools as a free trial version and purchase a licence key to upgrade at any time if they require greater functionality. GDoc Creator costs £49, while the full gDoc Fusion costs £99. The free version puts a watermark across all files the user creates.

We tested gDoc Fusion and found it quite straightforward to open a PDF, make some changes, then re-save the file as either PDF or XPS. The program also makes it easy to open multiple documents simultaneously and copy content from one to the other.

This level of functionality means that gDoc Fusion falls somewhere between simple PDF authoring tools that just perform a conversion and do little else, while staying easy enough for mere mortals to use, unlike Acrobat Professional.

For example, we used gDoc Fusion to open a Microsoft Word document containing a recent news article from vnunet.com, dropped in a page from a PDF data sheet and a Jpeg image of the product mentioned in the article, then re-saved the file as a new PDF.

The main screen of gDoc Fusion displays four icons representing its top-level functions: Quick Convert, Document View, Flick View and Page View. Users simply drag a file to the appropriate icon to open it, which can be an existing PDF or XPS file, a Postscript (.PS) file, or a Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.

Quick Convert converts a file to XPS or PDF using gDoc Creator. This appears to work well, but users should note that the appearance of the output file will depend on the page format settings in the original. We found that a wide spreadsheet kept getting spread across several pages until we changed the page settings in Excel to landscape and checked the 'fit on a single page' box.

You can also choose to output a file in Microsoft Word format. GDoc will open files from Word 2007 (.docx) and earlier versions (.doc), but only saves in .doc format.
GDoc Creator itself has a much simpler display that lets you just drop in a file to be converted, and change some of the settings such as the output file format, which is set to PDF by default.

Page View in gDoc Fusion opens a file for editing, like in a word processor. Providing the file is not set as read-only (as some PDFs are), users can highlight content, which automatically brings up a menu with a range of actions. These include copy, edit, redact (block out), highlight, strike-through, add a comment and create a bookmark.

Flick View is a visual search tool that copies the 'flick' gesture of touch-based devices such as Apple's iPhone. It is intended to let you quickly find what you are looking for by flicking through a document using the mouse.

Document View allows the user to open several documents at the same time and copy pages from one file to another. It displays each file as a kind of film strip, so you can see multiple pages from each document. You can simply drag pages from one strip to another to insert it into another file. Users can drill down to edit a specific page by double-clicking on it, which brings it up in Page View mode.

For users with Microsoft Office installed, gDoc also adds a toolbar to each application that lets you output the current document as PDF or XPS, and even send the output by email.

The gDoc tools run on Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, plus Windows Server 2003 and 2008. It requires a minimum 512MB RAM to run and 250MB available disk space to install.

Microsoft's XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack and .NET Framework are also required, but both of these are installed by the setup utility if not found on your system.

Overall, we found gDoc to be a simple and handy tool for working with PDF or XPS files for distribution. There are a few quirks, and a Release Notes file details known issues. We experienced the odd crash of the software during testing, for example.