When I previously reviewed Cerience's RepliGo V1.20 a couple of months ago, I was pleasantly surprised at this challenger to the PC reader market. Cerience have now released RepliGo V2.0 with a swathe of new features - so how does the new version rate against its predecessor and competitors?

In case you haven't read my previous review of RepliGo (why not?), it is an alternative free reader for PC's and handhelds (including Pocket PC and Smartphone). By free l mean that the readers are free, the software which generates the RepliGo files is not, but at USD$29.95 it is not very expensive.

The release notes list the following new features...

• Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition support.
• New bookmark, comment and hyperlink features.
• New text capabilities.
• Higher quality graphics.
• New printing capabilities.
• Flexible file synchronization.
• Enhanced Internet Explorer Integration.
• All new Windows Viewer.

I have to say straight away that in just the first ten minutes of playing with the new PPC RepliGo reader I fell in love with it immediately. Why? It allows the user to select and copy text - that one simple task has been the bane of my life in the past when trying to extract data from pdf's, even when armed with the full writer software.

First I put the new document generator through the same paces as before - you simply print to the RepliGo print driver from whatever application you are using, the driver can then copy the document direct to your device or let ActiveSync do it for you.  Once again I was impressed how much smaller the RepliGo versions of pdf's were when compared to their Adobe counterparts, and with no apparent loss of information.  I also viewed all the sample files available on my handheld - zooming, flowing and rotating the documents any which way to identify a flaw, none found.

Now came the fun part.  One of my criticisms of the previous version, in common with Acrobat reader, was the lack of ability to select text out of a document.  I've often had to deal with government data issued in pdf format and it is a nightmare to extract tabular data - on many occasions it's been cheaper to get a secretary to retype from the original - not so with RepliGo 2.0! 

The popup menu now sports Select Text and Highlighter/Colour, plus Add Bookmark and Add Note. Select Text does just what you would expect - permits text to be selected with a simple drag of the stylus over the text of interest... and it can then be copied to the clipboard, wonderful!  Highlight permits one of eight colours to be selected and used to highlight in the same manner, though I did find that I couldn't delete highlights - simply because white wasn't an available highlight colour, just a minor glitch.  Bookmarks and Notes work much as would be - position the cursor and record a bookmark title for the former, attach a small note to the text for the latter.  All these annotations may be saved back into the file without contaminating the basic underlying document - the text, etc. still remains intact - they also travel seamlessly with the document between platforms.

I also tried making changes on files generated using V1.20 but the reader wouldn't permit it, simply indicating that the V2.0 file format is required for the advanced text features - fair enough, at least it was kind enough to tell me and I could still view the older documents.

The new Windows viewer sports all the new features of the handheld and is equally simple to use - it launches fairly instantly too, unlike another product which leaves you watching its splash screen for ten to fifteen seconds while it loads all its libraries!

The other new features, such as WM 2003 SE support, flexible file synchronisation, higher quality graphics and the new Windows viewer are all very nice but for me they are merely the icing on the cake.  I still love the flowed text mode, though would still like to see thumbnails of images at the appropriate locations.  All that aside, the ability to save all your necessary reference documents, nicely small and static, then cut and paste from them into a new document is what sets this tool apart from 'the other reader' (plus its much smaller footprint).

RepliGo 2.0 is a great improvement on 1.20 and I truly hope it continues to thrive, I for one shall continue to use it and promote it.  I give it a very readable 9/10.