Customer Reviews

Nitro PDF Professional

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

Hi there,

My name's Chris Dahl, I'm the product manager for Nitro PDF Professional here at ARTS PDF.

It's unfortunate that we have to make a post of commercial nature here, however we've recently noticed a number of bogus reviews appearing that seem to have been written by a competitor of ours. If you take a look at the reviews from the following people (click on their name to see both the Nitro *and* the surprisingly glowing countering Scansoft review) I think you'll see it's quite apparent this is the case.

1. Dan Allerbach
2. Chris Malloy
3. kelli wakeman
4. Anthony Alphiso

What I'd suggest you do is download the trial version of each product from the respective websites and let you be the judge on the product. Feel free to contact me directly with any questions, my e-mail address is chris.dahl[at]artspdf.com.

P.S. it's required that you leave a star rating when writing a review on Amazon, so I had no choice but to select 5 stars. What can I say... I love our product!

Regards,
Chris.
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For months I was looking for something to CONVERT PDF files to WORD.

Most products did a so-so job and I just gave up on the project.

Got an email offer to try Nitro PDF and also buy it at a reduced rate.

Got the demo at download.com first, to "test drive" the program.

I had previously downloaded some full color, 6-8 page sales brochures in PDF format.
So I started with them and tested the conversion abilities of Nitro pdf.
A 6-8 page color document took about 3-5 minutes and reproduced the graphics nearly 100% perfect.
[possibly a slight color shift, but definitely "multitudes" better than any other product I've tried].

So I threw a pdf book with 297 pages and lots of pictures at it.

It took about 25 minutes to convert to a Word document format.

Again, the quality and graphics converted very nicely.

Nitropdf offers a demo at several shareware sites.

If you need a PDF creator PLUS a PDF converter, look no further.

The version I tested is 4.9.

UPDATE 03-08-2006
Reviews on PDF-to-Word conversions seem to be all over the spectrum.
In my case, the PDF files I used as test subjects were mostly technical IT-type white-papers and IT related books; that were originally published as soft and hard-back books.
The images being somewhat simplistic, in B&W (not color).

I would really like to see a review done by a major software
review site, which takes every PDF-to-WORD software pkg and
uses the exact same files as test files/subjects.

Then we could truly compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.

In my personal experiences, Nitro PDF did better at PDF-to-Word conversions than any other pkg I demo'd.

Another reviewer mentioned AABBY software.
I first obtained a full version of ABBYY software from a pc type magazine from the UK. It came with a CD rom disc that included a full version of ABBYY finereader pro, version 5.
(Prior to that, I had no clue as to who ABBYY was).

When I loaded ABBYY finereader V5, obtained my free unlock/registration key code, installed it and started using the product for OCR, I was totally impressed.
Having tried most every other OCR program out there, I immediately fell in love with ABBYY.
The accuracy of what it scanned was amazing; considering I was using various "inexpensive" scanners (all under $100 regular price, all on sale for under $50).
Considering that scansoft OCR products are between $99 to $150 and that ABBYY is usualy around $179 (or under $100 as an upgrade, INCLUDING competitive upgrades), I would spend the extra to buy the ABBYY finereader OCR.
I like the ABBYY results.
I really like the ABBYY "UPGRADE" policy.
If you can show proof of purchase for a competitor's OCR software, ABBYY will still give you their software at an UPGRADE reduced price. It's a liberal upgrade policy.

Some software makers are so tight-fisted with upgrade policy's; accepting only the previous version of their own product and nothing else.

Getting back to the PDF-to-WORD conversions.

I strongly suggest you TRY before you buy.

In my case, Nitro did a great job; while other folks mentioned less than satisfactory results.
But I've heard that it really depends on the complexity of the PDF being converted.
I've read how some PDF's are easier, or convert better, due to the makeup of the document and/or how it was created.

PS. Tip on getting Nitro for 50% off.
Sign up at V-com and/or Nitro PDF for their newsletter.
A 1/2 price offer for Nitro PDF goes out to their email lists about every 3 months.

I downloaded the trial of this program after having problems with Adobe. It's much better in my opinion. All we needed was the ability to make PDF documents from Excel and Word documents, be able to edit text on PDFs and be able to have customs stamps. I was blown away by how fast it was. On Adobe, if my computer didn't crash it took 15 minutes to make a PDF from a 2 page Excel workbook. By the time I looked down at the time to start timing it, it was done. Also, it automatically took all the pages from the workbook and made a PDF, whereas with Adobe you have to check the setting to bring all the pages and it never really did it right, I had to do them one at a time and then convert them to one PDF. Forget editing text on Adobe, it was so complicated we gave up on that feature. With Nitro, you just highlight the text and start typing. It was so easy. We are definitely buying this product, I thought we had to give up on ever being able to have PDFs replace our current documents.

Also, I didn't have *any* problems installing this. The installation ran like a dream.

Acrobat and PDF have been a mainstay in our electornic document workflows for many years.

Since Scansoft's PDF Converter and Nitro PDF were both released earlier this year, I have had them both installed within our organisation in order to rate them for prospective roll out through many more seats than what we currently have Acrobat installed on.

The first thing we noticed was that they both used the same base technology that provides the viewing, creation and editing functionality. (As such some of the reviews below seem somewhat odd!)

There were however differences.

Scansoft PDF Converter includes a tool called 'FormTyper' which basically assists you in adding form fields to your PDF documents. The upside is that it can save you some time when building your interactive PDF forms, but you can also use the standard form tools to add form fields (I found this to also be in Nitro).

Nitro PDF includes a comprehensive set of neat new plug-ins that we have found really beneficial to our business. The Optimize Document feature (like the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat) allowed us to dramatically reduce the size of our PDFs, and the Split File feature breaks down some of our massive PDF files into smaller individual files.

Furthermore, Nitro PDF has released a number of updates to their product since we purchased. Some have fixed bugs and others have added functionality. The next to last release led to us having trouble with activation even though we had the product for more than 5 months. Since then they have released a new update which has rectified those problems and added further functionality. Not all updates have been perfect, but we prefer to have software that is continually being improved. There have been no updates to Scansoft PDF Converter since we purchased.

FWIW We have just decided to roll out Nitro PDF because the feature set worked better with our day to day requirements for PDF workflow.

I would recommend trialing both products in order to decide which you would use.

Hope this helps.

I have used Acrobat for years in my business, but have only ever been able to provide few staff with a copy of the full version due to the high unit price and Adobe's ridiculous VLP program.

Nitro PDF and Scansoft have recently released competitors to Acrobat so I tried them both out. Frankly, they are very similar in almost every aspect - they are even the same price.

I chose the Nitro PDF because it had more functionality and the company (ARTS PDF) has a long history working with PDF and I know they are reliable because I also own their Split and Merge plugin for Acrobat.

I had a quick look around the net and found that you could download a fully functional version of Nitro PDF to trial the software.

Nitro PDF is great if you need to create, edit or mark-up PDFs and you don't want to pay Adobe $300!

I can only imagine that most of the 1 star reviews below are attempts to sabotage by a competitor.

Just download the trial version and see for yourself.

I have used Adobe Acrobat Standard and Pro versions for the past 7 years, and I am pretty familiar its feature set. Nitro PDF Pro is an excellent alternative to Acrobat 7 Pro. It enables the members of my department to compile various files into one PDF, annotate, comment, extract pages, apply security, drag in MS Office files, and otherwise manipulate PDF files in so many ways. I am in the process of deploying this product to dozens of users, and the cost of this project will be less than a third of the cost of deploying the equivalent Adobe product.

Try it. What do you have to lose?

I was sick of sending spreadsheets and tables to clients and them always telling me they have received them in some gibberish language because we don't have the same application version. I noticed Adobe's asking price and could not believe it! Someone mentioned Nitro PDF to me so after a quick Google, I found this gem. It's awesome for turning my spreadsheets into PDF and now no-one asks me to resend them. Frustration subsided for $100!

I am almost through the 30 day trial of Nitro PDF Professional. It is fast and does what you expect, but here are the negatives to look out for if you buy this:

1. It does not convert PDF to Word well at all. In fact no one does. It takes each line and makes it a text box. Good luck editting in Word in that format. It does do everything it says is does, but that is just the flaw in PDF conversion to Word right now.

2. The most annoying thing is the tool bars that get inserted into the MS Office applications. The tool bar wants to have its own tool bar row. This means that it messes up your look and appearance of the way you use your current tool bars. It also shrinks the workable space since it pushes down the tool bars one more row. This was sooooo annoying that I decided to look at other products.

All in all if you don't care about shifting tool bars, the product is stable and fast so try it out yourself for free for 30 days no obligation.

I was in need of a reliable PDF creation tool to convert batches of Microsoft Word documents to PDF. I found the Nitro PDF website through google, downloaded the free trial and tested it out on my computer. The creation process was impressive (both quick and reliable)! The fact that I could also "touch-up" spelling mistakes from within the PDFs themselves (instead of going back to the original Word files and creating the PDFs all over again) was really really handy. I was sold!!