To create cross-platform documents for the Web, Nitro PDF is a back-to-basics alternative to Adobe Acrobat.If you design print-ready, cross-platform forms or illustrated pages for the Web, you're familiar with Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), as well as Adobe's app for creating them, Acrobat. But Adobe isn't the only game in town, and the PDF environment is ripe for a back-to-basics tool. Arts PDF has taken the plunge with Nitro PDF, a full-on competitor to Adobe Acrobat 7.0 that provides most of the same key features for one-third of the price.
The PDF has come a long way since its original purpose as a simple way to share information electronically, and Acrobat has diversified into an ecosystem of instruments to fit pros, such as architects and publishers who create, produce, and distribute documents, alongside tools to manage work flow, author data-entry forms, archive information, and handle print production. Arts PDF has been selling well-regarded Adobe Acrobat plug-ins and work-alongs for several years. While the upstart company can't go toe-to-toe with everything a big organisation like Adobe offers -- such as refined documentation, a plug-in development kit, and subtle capabilities that most users don't even understand -- Nitro PDF can suit a small business or a single user who simply needs basic PDF creation.
Nitro PDF 1.77 is easy to load on your Windows 98 or higher PC; once you have the installer, one click does the trick. You can download the 20MB program for a 30-day free trial and pay US$99 (about AU$130) to keep it.
Palettes, menus, toolbars, and buttons densely crowd the Nitro PDF interface. We found it difficult to interpret many of the tiny icons. For example, a crossed hammer and wrench opens the Preferences dialog, and what looks like a red felt pen opens the digital signature menu. However, the Organiser -- a floating palette for configuring and applying key features -- makes it easy to keep your bearings. And a loupe tool, which Acrobat lacks, nicely magnifies a small patch of screen without zooming in on the whole work space.
Nitro PDF boasts a feature-for-feature match with Acrobat 7.0 Standard; it can convert a wide range of document types and batches of files into PDFs and combine pages from several sources into one file. Nitro also allows basic text editing with graphics tools for marking up, commenting on, and drawing on PDFs. But while Nitro can display a document in a variety of views, it provides less flexibility to select text. Acrobat can highlight type line by line, by the column, or within a box you draw on the screen; Nitro PDF offers only line-by-line selection.
Nitro includes reams of corny clip art, but you can easily add your own graphics files. You can also add stamps on each page to display the page number, the author, the review date, and so on, or you can combine clip art and stamps into headers and footers.
Nitro PDF offers security tools to encrypt a file, assign it a digital signature, or allow it to be read onscreen, but not printed. Nitro also lets you smarten up PDFs with metadata keywords to attract Web search engines. Plus, when you distribute a large archive of data stored in PDF files, you can include all the metadata to improve search results -- a must when consigning thousands of pages of text to a CD or a DVD. Also necessary for large files, Nitro lets you add bookmarks, which creates hyperlinks to chapters and subheadings.
We encountered some odd behavior when converting files to PDF; for instance, when we dragged and dropped files for conversion onto the desktop Nitro PDF icon, it instead opened the program's print-to-file driver. And when we converted HTML documents into PDF files, the hyperlinks disappeared -- a glitch we didn't encounter with Adobe Acrobat.
The shoestring nature of Arts PDF's operation becomes evident when you look beyond the software, and the five screens of Nitro PDF's built-in help file read like a sales brochure. You can't download the manual from the Web site; when we laboriously copied the HTML into a Word file, it ate up 90 pages, with useful but not detailed information. For example, Nitro leaves you on your own for creating forms or adding metadata. Arts PDF lacks telephone support, and e-mail support costs US$10 (~AU$13) for a five-incident package.
Downloading the app for US$99 (~AU$130) comes with two weeks of e-mail help. The company thankfully runs an active question-and-answer Web site where you can post queries; when we checked, most of them received quick replies from the company's chief technical officer.
Nitro PDF Desktop
Company: Nitro PDF
Price: US$99 (~AU$130)
6%
1%
I am going to return the product to Nitro Pdf.
I am writing this to advise others who would be swayed by the impressive promotion of the product.
I might consider it in the future if they can fix flaws in the program that are absolutely necessary and a few features that need to be addressed. I don't mean to rant so I'll keep my comments to a minimum.
The program will not read any file created by Adobe Acrobat files - a major nuisance. I had to install Acrobat Reader to view my old files.
No spell check and none planned - a major headache. Tech support recommended that I "cut and paste" the copy into MS Word to check spelling.
The program "crashes" from time to time.
When I insert a stamp on a document, the box around the stamp displays a red line if you click on it. This happens even if I lock the stamp. It doesn't look professional.
There are several levels of conversion quality but table boxes in Word 2003 were of varying thicknesses in medium quality mode.
Conversion to Word 2003 is not good. Every line is in a text box.
No index to search the in the manual.
Nitro had a forum on their web site but removed it because of the complaints from users.
To find out it's for you, I suggest you get the trial version and try it out. Also, check the support forum on their web site for other useful insights on the product.