Not just a free reader

These days, it’s fairly difficult to get excited when you hear of yet another free PDF reader. I mean seriously, how many times can you read the one PDF, right?

But whoa daddy – when it comes to Nitro Reader, you need to make sure you’re sitting down before you fire it up. It’s so jam-packed-full-of-features that just won’t cost you a cent – I can guarantee you’re going to make the switch – or at least come pretty darn close to it.

Unlike most bloggers who have given their reviews of the product,  I have been going into hand-to-hand combat with PDF for over 15 years. Making PDF products, using PDF products, pretty much anything you can think is possible to do with a PDF — I’ve done it. And after all this time, yes, after making the Nitro Reader drop and give me twenty.

It’s now my default PDF reader.

Nitro Reader is not just a Reader

Why would that be I hear you ask, or at least you should be asking? Well, it’s because the name itself is kind of misleading. You see it’s called the Nitro Reader – but, it’s actually far from Reader. It’s more a cut down version of the entire Nitro Professional product itself — we’re talking reading, writing, modifying, updating, the whole shebang.

The sort of thing that you would normally (and be happy to) pay a little something for.

And while it may have been possible to cobble together a variety of products on your computer – maybe some open source, maybe some free from other vendors to achieve a similar result. What’s the reality? Well, the software usually looks terrible and relies on your wizardry to make work together. And with respect to some of the new Nitro features, well, they just don’t exist at all.

Nitro Reader Task Bar

I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time running you through tips and how-to’s here — I’ll give you my quick appraisal here and you can go download it and see what you think yourself:

1. It’s easy to use, you don’t need a manual. It doesn’t have a bevy of tiny buttons that require a magnifying glass or microscope.

2. The features that are free, really are free. They’re not free for 14-days, or free for 5 PDF files, or for 25 pages. A quick list of the features from the taskbar:

• Add Note – Use this tool to add a sticky note to a PDF containing comments
• Highlight Text – You can highlight text on the page in all colors
• Type Text – Use this to indelibly type text directly onto the page
• Stamp Signature – The Nitro team say you can use the  ”Stamp Signature” to add your signature. Actually, this tool lets you stamp an image onto the page. It can be your signature, it can be a picture of your face, a picture of your dog, your mother-in-law, anything you want. But shhhh! Don’t tell them I told you.
• Create From File – Select a file, convert it to PDF and load into the Reader.
• Extract Text – Well, um, surprise surprise, it extracts the contents into a text file for reuse.
• Extract Images – Rips out all of the images within the file into a folder for reuse. Great for readers of “Men’s Magazine’s”.
• Reset Forms – Clears all the form field values so you can start from scratch.

3. You can actually fill in and save PDF forms. This is not possible in Adobe Reader at present. In fact, if you want to do this using Adobe’s products, you must be ready to fork out the cashola for Acrobat Standard or in some cases Adobe LiveCycle. If that’s the path you take, I hope you have deep pockets — made of fire retardant material.

Form Fields That Save

4. As I mentioned previously, we’re not dealing with just a reader here — converting to PDF is just as easy as dragging a document onto the Nitro Reader icon. PDF viewing, form filling, markup and conversion? Yes. And more.

Drag and Drop Conversion

But why?

Why have Nitro released a free PDF reader that not only competes with Adobe Reader but blows it out of the water?

It’s very simple. Nitro has another product called Nitro PDF Professional which is not free, but competes with Adobe Acrobat for professional PDF users. Nitro is betting that once you’ve tried out the 100%  free Nitro Reader then you’ll be willing to upgrade to the Professional version at a later date when you need to perform more advanced PDF tasks.

So there you have it, Nitro Reader has arrived and Adobe Reader looks rather behind-the-times in comparison.

Who knows where this will end — but one thing is for sure — the game has changed and Nitro is leading the charge.

FULL DISCLOSURE: While I am an investor in Nitro PDF (among others), this review is objective. My first experience with the Nitro Reader was part of the private beta review on May 12, 2010.

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Nitro Reader Blasts Off

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4x PDF Blog and News Screensaver

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Save your screen with PDF news from the 4x PDF Blog press

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I’ve just loaded up the latest release candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate (version 6, build 7100) — it was an  upgrade on the previous (semi-dead-like-a-slug) 32-bit Vista installation. I’ve got 4GB of RAM,  however, on the first 3GB will be usable until I load up my 64-bit version.

In starting my test with Adobe Reader, I downloaded the latest Adobe Reader (9.1 at the time, and 42mb download) for Windows Vista. I had already installed the app on Windows Vista, so this was a repair install — I had no problem with this completing, although, admittedly, as I mentioned, this was a repair not fresh.

That said, in our previous article Rowan said that he was able to do this from-scratch on a fresh Windows 7 machine.

…. here goes … nope … when viewing a PDF on a website –  (I selected the IRS Publication 590 [fascinating reading!]) with Chrome (1.0.154.59, my browser stays blank or pops up an error, and with IE (8.0.7100.0), it tries to download to the desktop.

Still no problems using Foxit Reader.

Side note: Although it took a colossal amount of time to install, I was mighty pleased that with Windows 7 I was able to ressurect my Vista installation without having to do a total recovery. Let’s just say using my “only-option-wipe-the-disk” ASUS laptop disk, not only wipes the disk, but the next few days from my life as well.

What about you? Any change? No luck? Or perhaps some problems?

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Adobe Reader + Windows 7 — Browser viewing still dead.

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A few days ago I tested Adobe Reader 9 on Windows 7 and didn’t discover any major issues. Adobe Reader worked correctly despite the fact that Windows 7 is not yet a supported platform. Today I thought I’d try the same with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro.

The good news is that I was able to install Acrobat 9 Pro on Windows 7 without experiencing any issues. Rudimentary testing of some of the basic functionality hasn’t revealed any obvious issues. I can view PDFs, print PDF, extract pages, add bookmarks, reduce file size, etc. I’m sure that there are bugs hidden away somewhere, but on the surface it looks like you could get away with running Acrobat 9 on the Windows 7 beta.

Has anyone else tried testing this? Any questions to ask or different experiences to report?

UPDATE: Karl has tried rechecking browser viewing using the latest Adobe Reader 9.1 and the new Windows 7 Ultimate (version 6, build 7100)  – still no luck. We’ll try Adobe Acrobat shortly, but I’ll certainly be surprised if there’s any change…

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Adobe Acrobat 9 + Windows 7: We Have Lift-Off!

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Installing software on an unsupported operating system isn’t usually a good idea. In fact, it is quite often fraught with risk, as a lot of people found in 2006 when they tried to install software on Windows Vista that was originally been built for Windows XP and hadn’t been updated yet. Luckily — so far — it seems like it is going to be a far smoother transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7. Which brings me to the topic of this post.

I have had Adobe Reader 9 installed on Windows 7 for the past few days and it appears to work A-OK. No crushes or obvious issues so far, although that’s not a guarantee that there isn’t problems — just that I haven’t discovered them yet. Experiment at your own risk.

A couple of screen shots:

Next stop, Acrobat 9 Pro on Windows 7…

UPDATE: Karl has tried recheck browser viewing using the latest Adobe Reader 9.1 and the new Windows 7 Ultimate (version 6, build 7100)  – still no luck. Any problems on your end?

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Adobe Reader 9 + Windows 7: We Have Lift-Off!

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Suitable for use on the desktop and at an Internet Cafe — for $9.99 USD per month (or $99 for 12), you can create as many ”Adobe PDF files” (as Adobe now officially brand their own variant) as you like, including tagged PDF.

This is one of the features that you won’t find in many other online converters such as PrimoPDF Online – or in free downloadable document to PDF writers like PDF995 (and even many that you pay for too).

Side note: In case you’re not in the know – tagged PDF files make it much easier for people using assistive technology such as a screen reader.

As well as the basics, like your Word to PDF conversions (view the rest of the supported file types here), Create Adobe PDF Online can also create hybrid PDF files from scanned pages using OCR technology. This gives your document the appearance of the paper-based original, but with the advantage of text stored behind-the-scenes which can be used for searching, copying and pasting.

For Windows users, you can setup a virtual PDF desktop printer which allows you to use the service just as you would a normal PDF creator. This is quite a well-thought out usability addition as it would become a little tedious having to upload every document that you wanted to convert to the web.

If you want to try-before-you-buy, there’s a trial running which allows you to convert up to 5 documents free of charge, not exactly what you’d call benevolent – but at least you can see a little of what you’d be getting.

All things considered, with an unlimited number of conversions, accessible PDF, OCR technology and official “Adobe PDF” almost guaranteed to work with any PDF reader — this may well be all you’d need — at least for your average business user with just a moderate need for decent pdf creation.

Of course, as is often the case, if you’re not in Canada or the US — then tough luck buddy!

oh, p.s. as an aside — whilst it’s downloadable, but not for use online, Microsoft’s free “2007 Office Add-in: Microsoft Save As PDF” does also create tagged PDF, as well as PDF/A compliant files (which are suitable for long-term archival).

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Use “Create Adobe PDF Online” to save as PDF — and view with (hopefully) any PDF reader…

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You might be asking why would anyone need more than one PDF creator? The answer is simple, if there was one free PDF creator that did everything (retain links, bookmarks, indexes, tables of contents, convert entire websites, optimize output, control font embedding, add metadata, etc), then you wouldn’t need more than one, but there isn’t, so you need options.

Here are some of the options for creating PDFs on Linux:

• CUPS-PDF: This is perhaps the most well known PDF printer driver for Linux. If you are using Ubuntu then CUPS-PDF is provided as part of the distribution, you can install it by following these instructions. My main complaint is that you cannot manually specify the location that you would like to save your printed PDF to, instead the application prints all PDFs to a hard coded location (in Ubuntu it is a folder called PDF in the home directory). Also, you can only configure the PDFs paper size, color and margin, you are unable to configure settings like the desired file size/quality, etc.
• OpenOffice: With the release of version 1.1 Open Office included a export to PDF option. While this isn’t a stand alone PDF creation tool, OpenOffice does allow you to open and print it’s native files as well as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and some image formats.
• ps2pdf: If you are comfortable working with the command line then you might like to check out this option. ps2pdf uses Ghostscript to convert postscript files to PDF. Most Linux operating systems support the creation of postscript files natively.

As you can see, the number of Linux PDF creators is quite limited at the moment, but last year at the Linux Desktop Printing Summit, it was agreed that PDF would replace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, so hopefully this will mean a number of high quality PDF printer drivers become available for Linux in the not-to-distant future. Read more here.
Don’t forget, if you don’t want to install any applications on your machine, you can use one of these free online PDF converters to create your PDF documents, they are completely platform-independent.

Lastly, it’s important to note that a number of applications, such as OpenOffice and Scribus, support exporting to PDF natively, so if you only need to create PDFs from certain applications, you may not need a stand alone PDF creator.

P.S. If I have missed any PDF printer drivers for the Linux platform then please add a comment and I will update the post. Specifically I’m looking for PDF printer drivers similar to Primo PDF or PDF Creator. Cheers.

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Creating PDFs on Linux

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