Cheap Nitro PDF Professional (Software) (Windows XP, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows NT) Price

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Customer Reviews of Nitro PDF Professional

seems useful only for niche users
Bottom line: this may be useful if you don't want to pay for Adobe Acrobat but you DO want to convert from Word to a fancy pdf document with links or security or the like. Otherwise, the free or shareware Word-to-pdf products recommended by our local IT department may be good enough for you -- or you may want to buy a real OCR product instead. <
> To get to the bottom line, first I checked reviews and then I did a few tests. <
> Checking reviews was an eye-opener. Here -- unlike other products I have bought from Amazon -- there were clearly a lot of skewed reviews from company sources and folks who only reviewed one product (or few reviews in a suspicious way). That applied to this and competing products. Thus I went to the PCMAG review source and others as well, googling around. <
>Next, I took advantage of the free trial offers on four products -- the Abbyy OCR product, nitropdf, adobe acrobat and cvision, all on their web sites. (My wife strongly urged me not to even consider a product which does not offer a free trial. Why buy it, if they don't trust their product enough to offer a trial? In this case, nitropdf and CVISION put ugly unchangeable stamps into all pdfs created by their trial versions; thus it's not as if people could abuse a free trial of a pdf maker -- so why WOULDN'T a vendor offer one, if the product is any good?) <
> My first step was to see what these products could do to clean up and compress a big and somewhat messy looking article on intelligent control and neural networks, posted at my personal home web site. That paper is a big pdf file, scanned from an image and converted to pdf long ago at my office. Abbyy and nitropdf were essentially useless here. Abbyy's conversion from text images to text was probably reasonable (about the same as omnipage, according to all reviews I found), but images and equations were so mangled that it would have taken forever to fix. In the other packages -- including Nitropdf -- I tried to touch up a sample page, by directly editing the pdf; I simply tried to erase a big unsightly blotch which came from scanning, but I couldn't find an easy way to do it, in any of the packages. I tried several options and help menus -- but I wasn't about to spend years on it either. So far as I can tell, both Acrobat and Nitropdf had SOME such editing tools... of limited scope. Next, in Nitropdf, I tried converting to Word and editing there -- and was very upset by the resulting mess. It was like seeing a huge double image of everything. Apparently, for convenience, when it sees a possible text image, Nitropdf gives BOTH an OCR version AND an image version of everything; in effect, it offered both the raw image and an Abbyy-like version inserted into one single file. Maybe some people have the time to deal with that, but I don't. <
> Finally, I also used all 3 pdf packages to simply read the old pdf and rewrite it as a new, compressed pdf. One ancient oversized pdf I had was 5 megs. Using nitropdf, to take it to the most recent pdf version they offered, I got it to 4.5 megs. Using their compression command (default settings), it went to 850K but hopelessly fuzzy and useless. Acrobat offered version 7 of pdf, and got it to 2.5 megs, without any blurring or loss at all. CVISION I tried on a bigger old pdf, about 8 megs, which it got down to about 1.2 megs. (Since Acrobat reader is free and always tries to update itself, I see no reason to post anything less than the current version. But things may be different for people preparing documents for legacy document systems.) That's 1.2 megs for about a hundred pages crammed with equations and images. <
> For inserting links and things to my own text source, I simply use Word to create html. If you feel insecure about posting html, maybe Nitropdf would have advantages over freeware and shareware in creating bulky pdf instead. I don't know. I do note that Acrobat itself also offers pdf-to-Word conversion, but I haven't even tried it. <
> Reviews say that full JBIG2 (pdf version 7) compression makes image-based pdfs "about as small" (do they mean twice the size?) as a Word or html-based version exploiting the original text and figures. I'm not sure exactly what that really means, but it does suggest that I can get away without doing a whole lot of OCR for the time being. If I WERE going to do OCR, I would probably buy the cheaper personal version of Omnipage. <
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Jury is still out
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>With that said, I avoided the free PDF converters such as CUTEPDF and decided to buy this. I just think that buying a retail PDF converter versus a free one eliminates a lot problems and advertisement banners. <
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>Bad reviews on this program point to installation problems... Well I recently did a reformat and reinstall of my computer system. I DISABLED my anti spyware and firewall programs BEFORE installation and did not have any problems. I can only guess that people that dont do this are the ones having installation problems. <
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>PDF to WORD conversions.... <
>I was able to transfer PDF files such as an EPSON rebate to Word with no problems. The outcome in Word with all of the images was OK. I have done my fair share of copying and pasting Excel into Word and everytime, I have had to do adjustments to get it looking properly. I think the same should be expeceted when converting PDF to WORD. I would never expect any conversion from PDF to WORD to happen with 100% accuracy. <
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>WORD TO PDF conversions: <
>No problems whatsoever converting Word or .jpg to PDF files. <
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>TOOLBARS: <
>One reviewer blasted NITRO PDF for the 'annoying toolbars' that appear in Office programs such as Excel and Word. YES the toolbars are there but they are not annoying.... Open Word or Excel> click on VIEW> Click on TOOLBARS> uncheck anything assoctiated with Nitro PDF. Getting rid of the toolbars is that simple! Granted, I have Office 2003 so if you have an unremovable toolbar as a result of Nitro PDF then please post more specs to help others fix the problem. I simply cant believe that someone with 'TECH" in their username does not know how to disable toolbars! <
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>COMPLICATIONS: <
>I recently encountered error messages when I opened Word or Excel. For an interesting google search type in "comctl32.ocx" or "ZNWORDADDIN". BOTH of these error messages are directly related to NITRO PDF. I managed to follow the links, which lead to the NITRO PDF help forums and fixed the problem. <
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>ALL IN ALL, I think the price I paid is a good deal. The program works, but you have to be able to troubleshoot it if you need too. <
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>In the case of the 'comctl32.ocx' problem I followed directions on the Nitro PDF Forums... to include download their file and then copy and paste it into a Windows System folder. Problem fixed! If you dont know how to find folders on your hard drive then this program is probably not for you.

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Everything I needed to work with PDF! Great product!
Having only recently decided that I could no longer live with just the free Adobe reader, I wanted to find something less expensive than the full version of Adobe Acrobat. Nitro PDF is the answer! The trial version is fully functional and gave me 30 days in order to test the product out. All in all, the $$ is well worth the outlay for this product