By: Erik Vlietinck
Sat, March 20, 2004 - 8:23:00

Iceni first released Gemini Solo for Mac OS X a couple of months ago. It now follows up with Gemini, a more complete and powerful version of the program. Gemini is aimed at repurposing PDF documents, something that previously was impossible unless you had Acrobat 6 Professional. And even then repurposing complete PDF documents is a drag. Gemini, on the other hand does only one thing: it extracts texts, images and graphics from PDF pages, but it does it extremely well.

Gemini can be used in a quite simple way: just hit the extract pages button and a dialogue window will ask you some questions as to file format and whereabouts, and the result is on your disk in moments. This is probably one of the most common ways to use Gemini, because it converts an otherwise static file into a file that you can edit, process and do all the things with that you can also do with Word or TextEdit documents.

Batch conversion of pages in documents, or complete documents is possible through the Batch command. More important, Gemini allows you to export many different page elements to files that can be further edited outside the PDF document. Tables can be exported while maintaining their formatting, even if they run across pages. The same holds true for articles and images.

Graphics, especially vector graphics, can be exported too. A diagram with callouts can be exported including the callout text or without the text, which is a very powerful feature if you're going to update a presentation, for example. Page headers and footers can be removed or documents can be exported while preserving their layout.

Gemini can also be used to convert a PDF document into a web page. The Gemini export capabilities support HTML with or without CSS, but support for more exotic formats like Palm Doc and eBook, or HTML 1 to 4, are available.

One thing that puzzled me during my tests with Gemini is that the application seems capable of bypassing Adobe's password protection of PDF documents. Only certified documents could not be opened by Gemini. Password-protected PDFs, however, seemed to open just fine, and what's worse, you can extract and export everything you like from them. The message therefore is clear: if you want to keep your document secure and out of reach of applications like Gemini, secure it with a certificate.