When I need to do something with a PDF on Windows, more often than not I use Nitro Pro. It has the power of something like Adobe Acrobat, but is nicer to use. It doesn’t hurt that it’s much less expensive as well.
They just released Nitro Pro 10, and I downloaded a review copy to check out and see what is new.
Batch Processing
There’s now the ability to perform actions on multiple files at once. Handy if you have a project where you need to do a bunch of editing, or you want to OCR (make searchable) a number of PDFs after scanning.
Find it under File > Batch Processing.
You can select operations like convert to Word or Excel, make searchable, print, apply password security, and even build your own batch process sequences.
I pointed it at a folder of non-searchable PDFs and it ripped through them.
Portfolio View
If you are working with a bunch of PDFs at once, it can be helpful to collect them together (temporarily or permanently). It can be handier to work with one file instead of jumping around. I wrote about doing this in PDFpen on the Mac before, which is a straight-up merge. Nitro can do this as well.
Nitro 10 has a PDF Portfolio feature that is similar but different. A PDF Portfolio collects files together, but:
- It is not limited to PDFs. You can have spreadsheets, images, etc. inside it.
- It is not a “merge”, but a collection. You work with the actual files inside the collection (it behaves sort of like a ZIP archive).
Open up your files in Nitro and go to the Home tab. In the Create section, hit Portfolio.
Click on the downward triangle and choose Add Open FIles.
You can then save the document to your drive and work with it from there.
Signatures
Nitro has long had the ability to drop a signature into a PDF file. You can see an example of that in my Nitro 9 review.
In Nitro 10 they’ve more thoroughly integrated their Nitro Cloud service to send a PDF to someone to request a signature.
Do that by opening up the document you want signed, and then on the Home tab in the Tool section you hit Request Signature.
Hit Request Signature in the little window that appears on the right. Enter the name and email address of the person you’d like to have sign the document. Hit Continue.
Now it’s time to tell Nitro where you’d like the signature and other information to go. You can drag fields onto the PDF, and that will tell Nitro what information you want from the signer.
Hit Continue, then customize the email you want it to send, and hit Request Signature when you’re done.
The recipient will then receive an email asking for the signature. One nice thing is that the person doesn’t need a Nitro Cloud account to do this.
When they click on the link, it takes them through the form, requesting the information that you asked for. When it comes time to sign, they can draw their signature or upload an image.
Even though I’ve showed signing documents, you can collaborate with others and mark up/annotate them as well.
Drag & Drop Pages
Sometimes you don’t need the full power of a document merge process – you just want to move one or a few pages into another document.
You can now accomplish this by dragging and dropping. Open the two documents you want to combine and hit the little Page Thumbnail icon.
Then drag the page(s) you want to move from the source document to the tab with the destination document. You can then move the page to where you want it to be within the destination document’s thumbnails.
Other Stuff
These are a few of the big ticket items in Nitro 10 that I wanted to show, but there are other things worth mentioning like 256-bit AES encryption, PDF/A conversion, and some refinements around OCR, deskewing, alignment, and editing.
If you are someone who works a lot with PDFs on Windows, Nitro Pro 10 remains my go-to tool. I managed to dig up a 15% off link as well, so if you decide to buy it, use this link to save a bit of cash.
