Review: Nitro Pro 8 gives Adobe Acrobat XI a run for its money - montanaalid1953

And directly in this nook, the aggressive competitor: Nitro Pro 8, a PDF application that costs clean $120. In the other box hulks Adobe brick Acrobat XI Pro, the reigning champion of PDF. Many PDF applications have challenged the whiz; is Nitro Pro 8 the extraordinary to pick off the upset? It depends on what the audience wants to hear and to pay for: If they're look for an application that can get most of their PDF-related tasks done without many extras, then Nitro Pro 8 is the one to root for.

Comparisons to Acrobat XI Pro

Nitro In favor 8 lacks more or less of the newest features in the $449 Acrobat XI Professional, which was released in short aft Nitro Pro 8. Spell Nitro Pro 8 can create and edit PDF forms, it has zero mechanism for creating Web-based forms, every bit Acrobat XI Pro's companion application, FormsCentral, does. (You could argue that you don't deman Acrobat XI Pro for that either; you can either download FormsCentral or simply use its site skip the PDF software entirely.) Nitro In favou 8 does not yet have the ability to glance over a PDF and suggest form fields, as Acrobat XI Pro does.

Nitro Affirmative 8's attractive, basic interface puts most controls in a ribbon bar.

Likewise, Nitro Pro 8's member signature features are basic PDF ones: You can add a "QuickSign," which is an image of your signature that you can watchword-protect; or you ass add a member key signature, which entails creating a digital ID, which is an encrypted, identify-based file you can generate inside the application with Windows' aid. I think some people may get these deuce types confused, but they're pretty easy to ensnare.

Nitro Pro 8 has nobelium supplying for sending verboten documents for signatures or for managing them, as the EchoSign website that is slightly integrated into Acrobat XI In favor does. However, because EchoSign.com does not require that you use Acrobat Eleven Pro, you could use Nitro Pro 8 with it as well—or you could use Nitro Pro 8 with another digital signature website, such as Docracy.com, DocuSign.com, or SignNow.com.

Editing For Self-satisfied or Clarity

When typing text into a PDF using Nitro Pro 8's Type Text tool, you'll straight off see helpful guides to help you align the text with other elements—school tex operating theatre images—on the page. Outlined boxes appear as you move your mouse among elements, and your cursor will snap to the edges of some of the elements.

Importation an Excel spreadsheet into Nitro Pro 8 whole shebang well, with proper formatting (only no formulas, of naturally).

However, you have to be aware of which editing mode you're using: If you'rhenium trying to edit the text in an present document—for lesson, to exchange a person's refer—and then you need to go to the Edit menu, get across Edit, double-click in a paragraph, then change the text. If you want to add text—say, to fill out a form, where alignment is often difficult in a PDF—you go to the Home menu, click the Type Text menu, then click on the document, using the new guides to helper you line things ascending.

Nitro Pro 8's capabilities in editing existing documents are not quite as broad American Samoa those of Acrobat XI Pro, but you can silence use it to do jolly substantive edits on documents. It can recognize the baptismal font, font size, and spacing in a document, and it will let you edit that text as if it were in word-processing program—with some limits. You can move text and image blocks around a page, resize them, and alter the vertical and horizontal spacing in textbook, but the controls aren't quite atomic number 3 fine as in Acrobat XI In favour of.

Exporting the spreadsheet back to Excel causes it to lose some formatting and to combine some cells that shouldn't constitute combined, but at least forthwith you can put different tables on different sheets within a workbook.

Neither Nitro Pro 8 nor Acrobat XI Pro offers any ensure over image wrapping, and moving OR resizing one element has none effect along another elements, so if you resize an image, for deterrent example, you'll have to move any interfering elements manually. At some breaker point, you undergo to decide whether it's just easier to dig up the document used to create the PDF and use its application to make changes.

If you can't get the original document you used to create a PDF, you keister examine converting the PDF into another format; Nitro PDF supports exporting to Word or Excel (only not to PowerPoint, every bit Acrobat XI can immediately brawl). You lav today exportation a PDF that contains tables to either a single Stand out spreadsheet operating room to a spreadsheet with multiple pages; in Nitro Pro 7, individual tables would get reborn into assort worksheets.

Add your signature tune Eastern Samoa a "Quick Signature" in Nitro Affirmative 8 operating theater create an encrypted whole number signature.

I first imported an Excel workbook intoNitro PDF 8, and that conversion looked satisfactory, though of course, it didn't include whatsoever Excel formulas. When I exported that PDF back to Excel As quaternate sheets, each Sri Frederick Handley Page appeared on a separate tab. The fonts were different, some cells had been combined, and all the numbers were stored atomic number 3 text rather than as numbers, but these problems were simple to fix.

One of Nitro Pro 8's nestlin new features is that automatically saves your open documents every 10 minutes (you can change the duration, if you like). Of course, that's only for documents in Nitro Pro 8; if you've used the program to convert to other application types, then you'll have to rely on those applications' auto-save functions. Nitro claims that the lotion creates smaller files than Nitro Pro 7 does, but I couldn't test that claim.

If you're trying to lend some text to a document in Nitro Pro 8, the application now shows you harmful guides (shown here by the specked lines and "ABC") to help you line things up.

Nitro Pro 8 now includes optical character recognition (OCR) capability from I.R.I.S. at No extra charge; last year, it was a $20 selection. That's a nifty move, I think over, because that allows you to scan documents and get editable text and images you can move more or less, delete, or put back. Without OCR, all you get is a single image file that throne't live edited.

Acrobatic Maneuvers

Nitro Pro 8 lacks umteen of the most innovative features that Acrobat XI Pro has, even if you don't consider things like online integer signature management and Web-based forms initiation, which are features you put up get at whether you own either lotion (or neither of them). Just for a basic PDF application, Nitro Pro 8 does many things well, and it does them at a commonsensical price.

Greenbac: The Download push button along the Merchandise Information page takes you to the vendor's place, where you fundament download the latest rendering of the software.