Entered CNET Catalog: 06/08/2005
SKU: CNETNITROPDF
Manufacturer: ARTS PDF
Manufacturer description
Nitro PDF Desktop is an affordable, fully featured PDF creation and editing product. Nitro PDF Desktop gives you full control over PDF documents, including commenting, form-filling and authoring, digital signatures, text editing, one-click creation from Microsoft Office and more. Nitro PDF Desktop is the first true alternative to Adobe Acrobat for people who want to use PDF.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 06/20/2005
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 $99 to keep it. A CD version is available for $129.
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 Organizer--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 $10 for a five-incident package. Downloading the app for $99 comes with two weeks of e-mail help; if you buy Nitro PDF for $129 on CD, you get five incidents of e-mail support. 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.
User opinions
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User Rating: 
7/10
Seamless Integration With Office 2007
Pros: Has same look and feel as Office 2007
Creates PDFs very quickly
Novice PC users can get a handle on it pretty quickly, unlike Adobe.
Advanced PC users are up and running with it in less than 20 minutes.
Documents look exactly the same as originals.
Cons: Not known well enough, when introducing it to user group they were somewhat wary.
Sometimes the PDF is larger than the original file.
User Rating: 
3/10
One of the worst user interfaces I've ever seen
Pros: Fairly cheap
Cons: Truly awful interface - the worst!
User Rating: 
6/10
Im Happy, its cheap, but is a little buggy.
Pros: Cheap, When it works, its great.
Cons: Buggy, No Mac OSX,
User Rating: 
1/10
Can turn it into your permanent Headache
Pros: Microsoft's Office Like Interface
Cons: A Lot... please see the opiniom
At first sight the program looks great, but when you start to use it you start to see the actions that you cannot do just like the following examples:
Save as: You need to copy the document just before open it in order to modify it just because the save as option doesn?t exist.
Fill-In forms: This cannot be and alternative of Adobe Acrobat just because the fill-in forms created with Nitro PDF cannot be filled with Adobe Acrobat. And Adobe native forms cannot be filled on Nitro PDF.
Form Assistant: This option his an absolutely waste of time, I was requested to do some fill-in forms for my job and this programs doesn?t help at first this doesn?t have a grid or ruler to measure the dimension of the field or object, cannot put lines or any kind of design on your forms, cannot do copy and paste y off course don?t have undo, If you need to deploy fill-in form with Nitro PDF this can turn your permanent headache.
Finally: Is you need a fast fill-in designer and reliable program as an option to the pricy Abode Acrobat, This is not an option.
User Rating: 1/10
Registered product failed in 4 months!
Pros: Zero; none; nada
Cons: Rediculous pre-programmed license failure
User Rating: 1/10
Not ready for use.
Pros: 14-day free trial WITHOUT watermarks
Cons: It doesn't work!
Quirky and unreliable.
- Fonts change upon file save.
- Untouched portions of file get changed on file save. (Example: Every "L" in the entire document was changed to an "S".)
- Stopped functioning more than once; re-boot required to get it to load again.
- Some menu selections simply do not function.
- Others only function sometimes.
SSSSSLLLLOOOOOWWWW.
User Rating: 
2/10
Needs work - not ready for distribution
Pros: Cheap Price
Cons: Problems and more problems
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.
User Rating: 2/10
Aggravating
Pros: Faster than Nuance PDF Converter Pro 4
Cons: Way too many bugs
User Rating: 2/10
Buggiest program I have ever purchased
Pros: Cheaper than Adobe
Cons: Full of bugs, poor tech support
User Rating: 
4/10
Good Product with Major Issues
Pros: Easy to Use and Cost Effective
Cons: Support is poor
User Rating: 3/10
Poor design, functionality. Can't easily be reinstalled do to undocumented "deactivation" procedure
Pros: Can't think of any
Cons: Other programs that cost less (but do much more) can be downloaded elsewhere
User Rating: 1/10
Worthless when support won't help and they won't!
Pros: Seemed fine until I tried to enter activation code
Cons: SUPPORT is not only non-existant, they will not help!!!!!!!
User Rating: 
9/10
Great alternative to Adobe Acrobat - only $99
Pros: Creation, editing and fully featured
Cons: Activation troubles, but sorted quickly
