Avanquest Software has built a reputation for itself by producing a steady stream of personal and business software solutions, and this latest offering provides a user-friendly means of viewing, creating, modifying and converting any PDF document.

In case you're still in the dark, PDF is an acronym for Adobe's Portable Document Format and it's the industry standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. The reason for its universal popularity is because it preserves all the fonts, graphics, colours and formats of the original, no matter what platform created it. PDF documents can then be accessed and read by downloading the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The beauty of Expert PDF Pro 5 is its sheer simplicity. The installation disk provides you with two pieces of software: a PDF Creator and a PDF Editor. Once installed, an integrated toolbar is created in Word and Excel so that you can swiftly convert the document you're working on into a PDF at the click of a button.

The drop-down menu offers you five choices: to convert the current document into a PDF, to convert all open documents into a PDF, to see a preview of the PDF, to create a PDF and send it via e-mail, or to modify the PDF parameters.

Once you've decided to create the PDF from your document, you move to a separate PDF Creator screen where again various choices are made available. For instance, the Watermark Editor will let you create watermarks by inserting notes, images, texts and attached files. In addition, objects can be manipulated using geometric shapes (e.g. ellipses and rectangles) or with a Bezier curve, plus comments and stamps can be imposed.

PDF templates can also be set up so that you can have a modified format that can be targeted at specific users, and this can include security settings, compatibility, type, size and resolution of images and use of different fonts. The interface is clear and uncluttered, with the icons doing most of the work for you. There's a thorough Help menu which acts as a tutorial for every step of the way, although you will find that the English is frequently peculiar as it has obviously been translated from another language.

Several PDF conversions can be worked on at the same time if you want the software to compile them into one long document, and you can re-order them before they're saved. However, there's no way to work on several jobs at the same time and save them into separate files - maybe something to look at in version 6.

There is a Batch creator, on the other hand, to generate multiple PDF documents from different sources, including HTML, as well as a PDF-to-Word converter allowing you to edit the contents as an RTF file.

A versatile, easy to use and multi-layered PDF converter package which should prove an invaluable tool for both personal and professional use when distributing documents.