www.pdfmoto.com

PDFMoto is a web publishing system. It converts documentation produced in Windows desktop applications into PDF format and then publishes them to a web site.

PDFMoto is simply put a powerful tool that allows non-technical users to update company websites. This tool takes the tasks of keeping a company or organization website that can refer to dozens of different issues and departments and provides the individual departments with the ability to manage it themselves. No longer is it necessary for a website professional to be available when you are ready to update a product page, or want to update schedules, new opportunities within the company or any of the countless other pieces of information that the average company needs to communicate to it's customers on what can be a daily basis.

Installing the program is extremely straightforward, regardless if you are installing to a local computer or across a network. The installation file is simply named 'Setup.exe'. Very early in the installation the program asks you to verify the install location, there is no automatic feature you have to tell it whether the install location is ok or not. The program will inquire if you want a desktop icon installed. I appreciated this as my desktop is already quite crowded so I opted not to have another on my desktop. The program is fairly small and installation took only a few seconds to complete.

The one real limitation to this program does show itself when you are configuring it. If there is a webpage whose source content was done in Microsoft Word, then whatever computer will be used to have PDFMoto installed to keep that page updated, must also have Microsoft Word installed on it. This program uses the original program to encode the webpage. This will be a problem where licensing may be a concern. PDFMoto runs in the background and uses a set timer to perform the updates.

The interface is very simple comprised of 4 icons: Document Libraries, Tools and Settings, Log Files and Manuals. It is a bit sparse and the headers in the top of the window do not offer more selections, they are just a different route you can take to do the same functions. I saw no reason for the duplication, normally when there are commands in a bar on the top, they help fill out the functionality of the command functions. They may be more specific or quick subcommands for the immediate icons in the body of the window.

This program is meant to be installed on every computer that will be used to manage a website. In the past it would be necessary to submit updates to a website administrator for them to format and post. That required very specific skills to manage. With this program, anyone from a group/depeartment/organization could be made responsible to maintain their own sections updates. All they need to do is create whatever document that will be posted set PDFMoto to perform the coding and update and then they can go on to whatever else needs to be done. The program will handle all of the details for coding the document to pdf format and post it to the website. The program can be set to manage a directory, and all sub-directories, and if a file is added or modified it will post the file to the website, overwriting the existing file if necessary.

One problem I have found is that this program will not convert documents created or saved using WordPerfect 9. The FAQ's in the manual do refer if you have problems converting documents to remove the first document mentioned in the error log and try again, I did do this and each subsequent rebuild failed all the files that were to be converted. I did not have access to the software to test this for other text editing software other than Corel WordPerfect and Microsoft Word.

This program is easy to install and pretty straightforward to configure. With minimal referencing of the manual that is thoughtfully provided with the downloadable install file, I was able to quickly set up and convert a test directory. So the ramp up time for training on this software would be minimal. It leaves a very small footprint on the hard drive as it utilizes the source programs for the basic encoding functions. In spite of the availability of large drives, it is always nice to find a product that does try to be economical in design.