Nitro PDF Professional

Adobe invented the PDF format, but that doesn't mean that Adobe Acrobat is necessarily the best PDF-creating and -managing software for you or your business. Nitro PDF Professional 7 ($199), from Nitro PDF, is a full-featured, lower-priced alternative that's worth looking at, especially for advanced PDF-editing and export features that aren't matched by Acrobat. You may end up deciding that Acrobat better suits your needs?and Acrobat is still our Editors' Choice for PDF software?but some businesses and home users may prefer Nitro for both its price and its feature set.

The PDF Lowdown
PDF software falls into three categories: readers, editors, and "printers." With minor exceptions, PDF readers don't let you modify PDF files, only view them. Readers are generally either free for the download, like Adobe Reader, or built into the operating system, like OS X's Preview. PDF editors typically let you create PDF files from documents or other applications, add or remove text, images, or pages from an existing PDF, and add security features to PDF files. While low-end freeware PDF editors exist, I think it's worth spending money to get full-featured software like Adobe Acrobat or Nitro PDF Pro. PDF "printers" are typically free or donation-ware programs that let you create a PDF file by "printing" from any application to a PDF file. (My favorite is BullZIP PDF Printer.)

Nitro Vs. Acrobat
Nitro PDF, like Acrobat, lets you add, remove, or shuffle pages in a PDF file, create bookmarks or links, create fill-in forms, and add comments and other markup, and create and use digital IDs. Some of Nitro PDF's features?notably the ability to redact (permanently remove data from) PDF files?are available only in Acrobat's higher-priced Pro version, not Acrobat's Standard version, Acrobat Pro of course offers a vast range of corporate-level features that Nitro PDF doesn't try to match, including automation tools and the ability to create dazing PDF portfolios.

Nitro's interface looks and feels like Microsoft Office's ribbon, with a row of tabs along the top, each tab offering an array of icons. Anyone who uses Office will be able to use Nitro PDF instantly. Acrobat's interface, in contrast, is a more-or-less unique combination of toolbars and panels that you'll need to spend some time exploring if you want to use all its features. Like Acrobat, Nitro PDF adds a PDF "printer" to your Windows printers, so you can create a PDF file from any application, simply by printing to the Nitro PDF Creator "printer." Also like Acrobat, Nitro PDF optionally adds PDF-creation tools to Microsoft Office, but you probably don't need these because Office 2007 and 2010 can create PDF files by themselves.

Standout Features
For me, the best feature in Nitro PDF is the one that automatically creates bookmarks in a PDF file, based on the formatting of the headings it contains. Acrobat doesn't have anything like it. This well-designed feature is almost effortless to use. You simply select some text in the PDF that is formatting as a heading, and the program finds all similarly-formatted text and creates bookmarks from them. The feature isn't perfect, because you can't specify (for example) that the program should create headings from centered text, but it's a major time-saver for anyone who wants to create navigation tools in a new or existing PDF.

Another feature not found in Acrobat is Nitro's ability to edit a whole paragraph of text, not just an individual line. If you've ever tried to use Acrobat to fix typographical errors in a PDF file, or to change the content of text, you've been frustrated by Acrobat's insistence on editing only the current line. If you add text to a line, Acrobat doesn't wrap the line to the next line like a word-processor. Instead, it extends the line into the margin. Nitro, in contrast, lets you add or remove text, and automatically reflow the paragraph. This feature doesn't always work. One limitation of Nitro's paragraph editing is that it doesn't move the next paragraph down the page if you add a line to the current paragraph, so you'll want to avoid making changes that will make the current paragraph overlap the next one.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/wawGPGxKFy4/0,2817,2400813,00.asp

cynthia nixon joe biden cspan state of the union drinking game oscar noms capital gains tim thomas