Nitro PDF Professional Review

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(More customer reviews)Nitro PDF Professional
Acrobat and PDF have been a mainstay in our electornic document workflows for many years.
Since Nuance's PDF Converter and Nitro PDF were both released earlier this year, I have had them both installed within our organisation in order to rate them for prospective roll out through many more seats than what we currently have Acrobat installed on.
The first thing we noticed was that they both used the same base technology that provides the viewing, creation and editing functionality. (As such some of the reviews comparing the two seem somewhat odd!)
There were however differences.
Nuance PDF Converter includes a tool called 'FormTyper' which basically assists you in adding form fields to your PDF documents. The upside is that it can save you some time when building your interactive PDF forms, but you can also use the standard form tools to add form fields (I found this to also be in Nitro).
Nitro PDF includes a comprehensive set of neat new plug-ins that we have found really beneficial to our business. The Optimize Document feature (like the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat) allowed us to dramatically reduce the size of our PDFs, and the Split File feature breaks down some of our massive PDF files into smaller individual files.
Furthermore, Nitro PDF has released a number of updates to their product since we purchased. Some have fixed bugs and others have added functionality. The next to last release led to us having trouble with activation even though we had the product for more than 5 months. Since then they have released a new update which has rectified those problems and added further functionality. Not all updates have been perfect, but we prefer to have software that is continually being improved. There have been no updates to Nuance PDF Converter since we purchased.
FWIW We have just decided to roll out Nitro PDF because the feature set worked better with our day to day requirements for PDF workflow.
I would recommend trialing both products in order to decide which you would use.
Hope this helps.
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Update: Jan 2008
Nitro PDF released a new version (5.3) of the software late last year. I have been testing the new version since. The biggest difference is that Nitro PDF is no longer based on the same technology as it previously was. While the functionality is little changed, there are some major differences:
1. The product is far more stable than both the previous versions of Nitro PDF and Nuance PDF Converter that we had tested. After speaking to the Nitro PDF support team on a regular basis (they were helpful) over the last year or so, it is obvious that the developers have taken note of some of the issues with the previous version. This is a big tick!
2. The interface has changed. Frankly, I am somewhat lukewarm to what they have done. It does use the new Vista ribbon interface though, so some may find its progression a good thing ....
3. This version runs a lot faster on my PC than the previous version. Particularly when creating PDF files which is a good thing.
All in all, it is well worth upgrading to this version. Nitro PDF continues to work hard on improving their software
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Update: May 2010
I have updated this review on the page for the new version 6 Nitro PDF Professional V6


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Create, Convert & Edit PDF Documents 300% Faster than Adobe Acrobat. Nitro PDF Professional is everything you need to create, convert and edit PDF files. All files are 100% industry standard and compatible with other PDF viewers. FEATURES: Fast, High-Quality Document Conversion. Convert any kind of file to PDF - alone or in batch. Convert PDF files back to Word while retaining text, graphic and pages. Combine multiple documents into one PDF. Convert Word, Excel®, and Powerpoint® to PDF with one click. Convert paper to PDF by scanning and converting documents. Comment and review PDF documents just like paper documents. Insert sticky notes - just like Post-it® notes - on your PDFs. Highlight, underline, and strike-through text on your PDFs. Use pens, shapes, and other drawing tools and apply stamps like “Approved” or “Draft.” Take charge of the PDF document review process - record, view, sort, and import and export comments. Quickly edit any PDF file with the best-in-class manipulation tools. Insert, edit, move, resize, and delete text and graphics in PDFs. Shuffle pages to create client-ready PDF files. Apply headers, footers and watermarks. Insert text, numbering, and graphics in your PDFS. Generate PDF hyperlinks and bookmarks automatically. Protect documents with passwords and digital certificates. Protect your PDFs with powerful 128-bit encryption. You decide if your PDFs can be printed, edited, copied, commented, and more. Use digital signatures and digital IDs to ensure the integrity of your PDFs. Profiles make it easy to apply the right security to your PDFs, every time.

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