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.