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Nitro PDF Professional – Edit PDFs without breaking the bank

Matthew Guay — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:11:42 +0000

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.

Outlook and UAC and VirtualBox, oh my!

Matthew Guay — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:53:46 +0000

It’s been a busy week between finals at Florida Tech and a major problem with an article I wrote on running XP Mode in Virtual Box, so here’s your chance to catch up my How-to Geek articles if you’ve been waiting for me to post them here.

Outlook:

I wrote two articles about my favorite plugins for Outlook: Forgotten Attachment Detector and the Drop.io plugin.

Never Forget to Send an Email Attachment in Outlook

Send up to 100MB attachments with Outlook and drop.io

Windows:

Is IE 8 any good for web developers? Check out a fun trick you can do with IE8 at:

Edit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8

And then, Find your computer’s location with Windows 7 and Geosense

UAC is often unloved and misunderstood, which is why I wrote Understanding User Account Control in Windows 7

All work and no play …. well, let’s look at Window’s ancient ancestors! Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11

And then, to continue my series on running XP Mode in extreme and unusual ways, I wrote an article on how to run XP Mode in VirtualBox. Windows XP didn’t appear to activate correctly when users started trying to follow my directions, so we quickly went back to the drawing board. Thankfully, MysticGeek at How-to Geek dug up a great way to still get XP Mode to work in Virtual Box via the VMLite plugin. This integrates XP Mode with Windows 7 very nicely, including showing XP programs directly in your Windows 7 Start menu just like the official XP Mode. Check this method out at Install XP Mode with VirtualBox Using the VMLite Plugin, and you can even still see my original infamous article if you’d like at How To Run XP Mode in VirtualBox on Windows 7 (though remember, you won’t actually be able to activate XP Mode this way).

Books, books, and more books!

Microsoft press has the good habit of giving away free ebooks periodically, and they recently released a new on on their blog for free. This book, Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft, offers some unique and interesting pointers to make your career more successful in any field. Check out their blog post for more info, and download the book for free in PDF or XPS formats.

One more thing!

The neatest new download of the week was the new Opera 10.50. It brings a sleek Aero UI and great Windows 7 integration to the most popular browser that no one uses (on the desktop anyhow). This new version should help change that; it’s fast, pretty, and easy to use with streamlined menus. But this wasn’t Opera’s only new release of the week; they also released a beta version of Opera Mini 5 for Windows Mobile. Unlike previous versions that ran in Java, this version is a native Windows Mobile browser, includes tabbed browsing, and is amazingly fast. Opera Mini was already my favorite browser on Windows Mobile (Chrome and IE8 tie on the desktop for me ), and this just made it even better. Check them both out when you have a chance; you’ll enjoy it!

Latest articles from Digital Inspiration

Matthew Guay — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:00:25 +0000

In between all of my new writing at How-to Geek, I have still been writing some articles for Digital Inspiration. I recently reviewed Manymoon, an exciting project management system that is fully integrated with Google Apps. It works both with the free standard Google accounts, as well as pro Google Apps accounts. Find out more here: Manymoon, an Online Project Management Software for Google Users

Then, I personally started out blogging at WordPress.com, but then recently moved to a self-hosted WordPress.org install with MochaHost. The great thing is, I was able to move all of my old content to this site, and also redirect all of the traffic from my old theoldestof8.wordpress.com domain directly here to www.techinch.com. Check out the article I contributed to at Digital Inspiration for exactly how to do this: How to Migrate your Blog from WordPress.com to a Personal Domain

Linux in Windows the Easy Way

Matthew Guay — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:49:42 +0000

Would you like to try out Ubuntu (or any other popular distribution of Linux) from the comfort of your Windows 7 (or Vista or XP) desktop? With a quick download of the Ubuntu ISO and VMware Player, you can do this easily. And, you can even run Linux apps side by side with your Windows Apps, and even see their icons in your taskbar! This article is my latest on Virtualization, so check it out on How-To Geek to see how easy it is to run Ubuntu right inside Windows!

How To Run Ubuntu in Windows 7 with VMware Player

Customize Windows 7 Starter

Matthew Guay — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:44:23 +0000

Want to make Windows 7 Starter look and work just like you want it to? Check out my post at How-to Geek for tips and tricks on how to change your screensaver, sounds, theme, icons, and even customize your desktop! Once again, I’ve been presently surprised that Windows 7 Starter is more capable than one would assume at first glance. Continue reading at How-to Geek:

How To Personalize Windows 7 Starter

Find your System Specs with Speccy

Matthew Guay — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:46:28 +0000

Speccy is a new, great little system tool that gives you detailed information about all the hardware on your computer. It is even available in a portable version so you can run it on a computer at a store, friend’s house, or anywhere else you need to check detailed stats. My favorite features is that it shows the model, speed, latency, and more from your Ram; this is really helpful if you’re wanting to add more RAM to your computer. Check out my whole overview of this tool at How-to Geek:

Find Detailed Hardware Information with Speccy

Lifehacker also found this useful, and linked to my How-to Geek article!

Lifehacker: Speccy Gives You Detailed Information About Your Hardware

Undelete files and folders in Windows 7

Matthew Guay — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:36:20 +0000

My favorite feature in both Windows 7 and Vista is the “Previous Versions” tool. This has absolutely saved me several times, including once when I accidently deleted a nearly finished essay! I think this is the hidden gem in modern versions of Windows, so I really enjoyed writing about it for How-To Geek. Check out the article intro below, and then continue reading it at How-To Geek.

Have you ever accidently deleted a file, or removed a crucial part of a document only to realize it no longer makes sense? Windows 7 is smart enough to protect you from yourself, and here we’ll see how you can restore files in any edition of Windows 7.

Continue reading: Restore Previous Versions of Files in Every Edition of Windows 7

Create your own XP Mode for 7 Home Premium and Vista!

Matthew Guay — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:17:35 +0000

My recent article on How-to Geek about running XP Mode without hardware virtualization got a lot of comments from people wanting to run XP Mode on other editions of Windows. XP Mode is only licensed for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, so if your computer is running 7 Home Premium or Vista you cannot run it. But, if you have your own legal copy of XP, you can make your own XP Mode. It’s actually very easy with VMware Player, and takes less steps than importing the standard XP Mode. Check out my article at How-to Geek, which details all the steps involved and offers some tips on integrating your virtual XP with Vista or 7!

Create an XP Mode for Windows 7 Home Versions & Vista

This article was also listed at Lifehacker! Check that out at:

Lifehacker: Create Your Own XP Mode for Any Version of Windows

Run XP Mode without Hardware Virtualization

Matthew Guay — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:57:58 +0000

Several months ago I wrote about VMware’s release of VMware Player 3.0. This was a major upgrade to VMware’s free desktop virtualization offering, adding support for creating virtual machines and running them in Unity mode. Windows 7’s release, then on the other hand, boosted desktop virtualization’s position in the marketplace with XP Mode which brings a virtualized copy of XP to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. Many people have been disappointed that Windows Virtual PC, required to run XP Mode, also requires hardware virtualization support. If your computer doesn’t have it, then you simply can’t run XP Mode.

Or can you? Thanks to VMware Player, you can actually still use XP mode even without hardware virtualization! And, even if your computer can run Virtual PC, you may get better performance or features using VMware player. Check out my article at How-To Geek for all the inside information on how to do this!

Run XP Mode on Windows 7 Machines Without Hardware Virtualization

This article was also featured on Lifehacker today! Check out the Lifehacker article:

Run XP Mode on Windows 7 Machines Without Hardware Virtualization

And check back soon … I’ve got a lot more articles about virtualization coming to How-to Geek!

Sync all your email accounts with Hotmail

Matthew Guay — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:41:46 +0000

For all the talk about Gmail, Hotmail is still a very viable and highly used webmail service. My main email account is a Windows Live Hotmail, and I can easily access it from Outlook, hotmail.com, or my Windows Phone, depending on what I’m doing. Most of my emails come to my @live.com Hotmail address, but I also have a number of other email accounts, including from my college, Gmail, and more. The great thing is that all of my mail is always avialable through Hotmail. No matter where I am, I can easily check Hotmail and get all of my email!

So how do I do this? Check out my article at How-To Geek for more info!

Keeping track of multiple email accounts can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re a Hotmail user, you might want to integrate all of your POP3 accounts into a single address for more efficient access.

Hotmail can send and receive emails from any POP3 enabled account, and it even supports SSL for secure connections. Most email accounts from your internet service provider, work, or school will work directly in it. Make sure to have your other account info, as you may need it in advanced setup. For this demonstration we’ll walk through setting up a Gmail account, but it should work with your other POP3 accounts as well.

Read on for more information – How to Add POP3 Email Accounts to Hotmail