Nitro PDF Professional – Edit PDFs without breaking the bank

We regularly edit and create documents, images, videos, and more on our computers, but PDFs are the one file format that many people still cannot easily edit or create.  Adobe Acrobat, the industry leading PDF solution, is expensive, and most people simply have the free Adobe Reader so they can view, but not edit or create, PDF files.  With PDFs being one of the most used files for professional documents, a simple and affordable PDF editor is an increasingly needed thing.  Nitro PDF Professional offers such a solution, and at $99 it is much more affordable than Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Last year I reviewed a wide range of free tools from Nitro to create and convert PDF files, ranging from their PrimoPDF creator to the excellent PDF to Word online conversion service.  These products are all excellent and highly recommended, and a recent update to PrimoPDF made it an even more valuable PDF creator.  But if you want to edit PDF files directly, or create your own rich PDF documents and forms, Nitro PDF may be the best solution for you.

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0

Features:

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0 offers many of the features of Acrobat Pro, including the ability to:

• Create PDF and PDF/A documents directly from Microsoft Office with a plugin, and from any other program with the virtual PDF printer
• Convert PDFs to Word, Excel, rich text, or plain text documents.
• Combine PDFs, or extract individual pages from a PDF
• Edit PDFs, including images, text, links, bookmarks, pages, and more
• Review and markup PDFs for collaboration
• Password-protect and/or digitally encrypt PDFs for security
• Create PDF forms with Javascript, and save filled forms for future reuse
• and more!

My very favorite features are the ability to annotate an existing PDF and save filled out forms for future reuse.  Annotating a PDF is very useful.  For instance, if you need to sign the last page of a PDF document and then email it to someone, you can simply print the last page, sign it and scan it, and then add it to the original PDF document instead of the original last page.  You can also drag-and-drop pages on the page column on the left to rearrange them as you need, so even if you got the page out of order you can still put it back just like you need.  Then, saving filled out PDF forms for reuse is very useful.  I often have to fill out PDF forms and email them in signed for college, so this scenario is very common for me.  It has truly been a lifesaver many times!

Simply drag and drop pages to rearrange them!

Interface:

Upon first run, Nitro PDF presents you with a nice introduction of its features so you can quickly learn your way around the program.

It is built with the Office 2007 ribbon interface, so if you’re used to it (or the ribbonized applications in Windows 7) you should feel immediately at home.  The ribbon interface highlights functions and makes it easy to learn your way around the program.

Looking at the tabs on the ribbon gives us a quick overview of Nitro PDF’s features.  Here’s a shot of each 6 tabs on the ribbon in order, and the tools they contain.

Nitro PDF opens your PDFs in tabs, so you can easily work on multiple documents at once.

Converting PDFs to other formats

Converting a PDF document to a Word document is easy with Nitro PDF.  Simply open the file you wish to convert, and click “To Word” in the first tab.

This opens a conversion dialog, where you can change settings or choose to only export certain pages.

Nitro PDF will then automatically convert your file to a Word document…

And then open it for you to see in Word.  Here’s the two files side by side, the PDF in Nitro and the Word file in Word 2010.  This file was an ebook created in Adobe InDesign, and as you can see the conversion isn’t absolutely perfect, but it is very, very close.  With less complex documents, the conversion was even higher quality.

You can also convert a PDF to a Word document directly from Windows Explorer without even opening Nitro PDF.  Simply right-click on a PDF, and select Convert PDF to Microsoft Word.

Editing PDFs

But if you’d like to simply edit something in the PDF, you can do this directly in Nitro PDF.  Click the Edit button on the ribbon, and you can choose to Edit Text and Images, or edit links in the page.

Here I edited the title of the page.  Even though I didn’t have this font installed on my computer, I was still able to edit it using the embedded font.  Simply press save, and the changes to your PDF are all set.

Or, with the Edit tool, I can select an image on the page, and directly change its resolution, color, size, or scale, crop it, or even replace it.  One especially useful tool is the Extract tool: click it to save that image in its original resolution!

Or if you want to insert text, images, watermarks, or more to the PDF, click the insert tab to add them.

Combine PDFs

You can also combine 2 or more PDFs into one document.  Click the Combine Files button…

…and then select the files you want to combine and click Create.

You can also do this directly from Explorer; simply right-click on a PDF to combine it with another.

Creating a PDF

Nitro PDF makes it easy to convert any file into a PDF.  You can simply right-click on a document in Explorer, and select Convert to PDF.

Or, you can Print anything to PDF with the handy virtual PDF printer.  Simply select this printer when you want to save a document as PDF, and Nitro PDF will let you save it easily with a variety of options.

Of, if you’d prefer to create a blank PDF, you can do so directly from the menu in Nitro.  This is especially useful if you want to create a form or other dynamic PDF.

Problems

I have used Nitro PDF Professional on a regular basis for the past several months, and unfortunately have noticed some issues.  First, it can experience significant slowdowns if you edit a very large PDF.  Especially when editing a large image in a PDF Nitro PDF would often freeze.  It would usually recover on its own after a couple minutes, but it did cause some interruptions a couple times.  The only other problem I experienced was similar: if you are using the edit or snapshot tool and hold down on your mouse button for too long while trying to select an object, Nitro PDF may freeze.  It will immediately unfreeze when you release your mouse, however.  This caused a few problems when trying to select a large amount of text or precisely take a snapshot of an image.  Other than these problems, Nitro PDF ran great.  It never messed up or lost formatting in a PDF in my experience, which is often a concern when using a third-party PDF editor.  And in the time I’ve used it, they have issued updates that already fixed some problems I saw and added new features (including the PDF to Excel tool).

Other products from Nitro PDF

Nitro PDF also offers two other products to help you edit and create PDFs.  These include Nitro PDF OCR and Nitro PDF Express.  I have not been able to use these products and review them, but since they are based on the same core my above experiences should still apply.

Standard

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0, as reviewed here, retails for $99 as a download from Nitro’s online store.  They also offer a new Nitro Pro OCR for $119.99 that adds a powerful optical character recognition engine to Nitro PDF’s tools.  It can create an editable PDF from images, and recognized text in English, Spanish, French, and German.  This can be handy if you often need to edit PDFs of scanned documents, for instance.  It is basically $20 over the cost of the standard edition, and if you already own Nitro PDF Pro 6.0 you can upgrade to add OCR to your version for just $20.

Nitro PDF Express

If you don’t need all the features of Nitro PDF Professional, you may be interested in Nitro PDF Express.  This smaller PDF editing program lets you convert PDF files to Word documents (so you can actually edit them in Word, and then re-create them as a PDF), create PDFs from any program, combine PDFs, extract pages from PDFs, and secure your PDFs with digital encryption.  Basically it offers everything from Nitro PDF Pro except the ability to directly edit PDF and create PDF forms, so it may be very handy if you don’t need to do that.  Nitro PDF Express only costs $49, which is even more affordable than the Pro version!

Closing:

As we found before with their free tools, Nitro PDF offers a wide range of interesting and affordable PDF solutions.  Whether you need to edit the text in a PDF or add a page to the end of one, Nitro PDF Pro is a great tool for the job.  Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF’s main competitor, starts at $299 for the standard edition, so it offers an exceptional value at under half the price of the competition.  And with the Express, Professional, and OCR editions, they span the price range from $49 to $119.99 so there’s something for everyone (including those with even smaller budgets … give their free tools a try!).

Links:

Nitro PDF Professional

Nitro Pro OCR

Nitro PDF Express

Disclosure: I received a key for Nitro PDF 6.0 for free from Nitro and used this copy in the review.  However, I have used Nitro PDF for over 6 months now, so my thoughts on the program are entirely based on my use.