TECH SPOTLIGHT: Nitro PDF packs in all the features of Adobe Acrobat easier, and for much less

— Business in the Internet age means a lot of documents flying across the Internet. Many of those, be they forms, reports or publications, are in a universal format called Portable Document Format, or PDF.

PDFs are an industry and Web standard created by Adobe Systems, the makers of programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe offers a free program, Acrobat Reader, that allows you to open and read PDFs easily. Creating or editing them, however, isn’t so easy.

The most common way isto use Adobe’s Acrobat Pro software. Unfortunately, it’s very expensive (about $299 retail for the full standard edition) and not very user friendly. But if you want to create an Adobe-standard document, you need an Adobe program, right?

Not necessarily.

Enter Nitro PDF, a program that can view, create, edit and share PDF files with ease. And I do mean ease. It also costs a lot less.

Nitro PDF comes in an express version and a professional version that adds a lot of really great features. Frankly, if you’re going for a full-featured PDF editor, I’d shell out the extra $50 and go for the professional version.

The first thing I noticed about Nitro PDF is its layout. It reminds me of the latest version of Microsoft Word, but with tabs and groupings that actually make sense. Tabs running across the top bring up a strip of icons that provide one-click accessibility to the most common tools in that category. For example, the “insert and edit” tab offers tools like insert text; header and footer creator; image and watermark insertions; and tools to add bookmarks or links.

Nitro PDF also has a tab to create forms, something I never found to be all that easy in Acrobat. Here, you can draw buttons and text boxes to be as big or small as you want. Once the document is saved, it’s easy for someone else to open the form, fill it out and send it back. The text tools let you erase, bold, color or resize text without having to dig for the proper tools.

Nitro PDF lets you do all the things you expect to do, like markup documents for review, create bookmarks and hyperlinks in the documents and add the capability to digi-tally sign documents.

The program allows you to convert a variety of files, even those with images or tables embedded. I like that it works well with Microsoft Office products like Word and Excel. As easy as it is to make PDFs from scratch in this program, it’s a lot easier to create documents in Word and just convert them. The conversion process is a breeze - you can just drag the file and drop it into Nitro PDF. The program automatically converts the file from there.

I didn’t really have any problems with this program. It didn’t crash, it performed the tasks I gave it with relative ease, it converted and saved the files quickly. It’s a good program.

I’ve used Adobe products for years, including several versions of Adobe Acrobat. I rarely have trouble with Adobe software nowadays, except Acrobat. Its interface and tools can be very frustrating to use. Editing text in Acrobat is difficult at best. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m just saying it can’t be done easily all the time.

Perhaps that’s why Nitro PDF impressed me so much. It turned some of the most frustrating tasks in Acrobat into simple ones. It made it so much easier to edit text and create forms. In short, Nitro PDF is what I always wanted Acrobat to be - an easy wayto create and edit PDF files.

As if that isn’t enough, Nitro PDF has one more thing going for it - the price. The Professional version retails for about $200 less than the standard version of Acrobat, and about $350 less than the full Acrobat Pro.

So if you need an easier, cheaper way to create standard PDF files, Nitro PDF may be the solution. The PDFs can still be read with Acrobat Reader, but you won’t have to wrestle with the complicated tools of Acrobat to create the documents.

Melissa L. Jones can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Where it’s @

Nitro PDF requires Windows XP or later, 1GB of memory and 300MB on the hard drive (150MB for the express version). There is no Macintosh version. The product retails for $99 for the professional edition and $49 for the express. A 14-day free trial is available on the website. More information is available at www.nitropdf.com.

Business, Pages 19 on 02/21/2011

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