PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE
MANAGE PDFS DON’T USE Pdf-xchange Editor www.snipca.com/29319
Now over 25 years old, the humble PDF shows no signs of shuffling off into the digital sunset just yet. But despite its popularity, genuinely free software for basic Pdf-editing tasks is curiously rare.
At first sight, Pdf-xchange Editor seems to offer everything you’ll need (“the smallest, fastest, most feature-rich FREE PDF editor/viewer available”). Dig beneath this bold claim on the website, and you’ll find a note explaining that 15 per cent of the features will place a ‘trial’ watermark unless you buy a licence.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the program, you’ll notice small shopping-basket icons next to certain features. Although you can still use these, doing so will place multiple garish ‘BUY NOW!’ adverts on each page of your PDF, complete with a link to the website. The end result is that your PDF becomes nothing more than a billboard for Pdf-xchange Editor.
Worse still, even some of the most basic features – including merging, splitting and deleting individual pages – end up inserting watermarks.
In its favour, Pdf-xchange Editor lets you edit text in an existing PDF without watermarks, which is something most free editors don’t offer. However, PDFS aren’t designed to be editable, and we found it very much hit and miss, often coming up against formatting problems.
WE RECOMMEND Pdfsam www.snipca.com/29320
You’ll find plenty of online tools to split, merge and insert pages within a PDF, such as Pdfescape ( www.pdfescape. com/windows). Although online tools are convenient, you’ll have to put up with adverts and they all have restrictions (Pdfescape includes adverts and limits