iSkysoft PDF Editor Pro 6.0

Among the many alternatives to Adobe Acrobat available for creating and editing PDF documents, iSkysoft PDF Editor Pro stands out by its clean interface, its high-quality visualization options, and the extensive functionality that it provides. This includes OCR support, PDF protection, text annotation, PDF conversion, and the possibility of combining various PDF files into one, among other features.

We keep on looking at PDF files as if they were but Word (or other text-based) files on steroids – “they are the same thing but with a nicer look and feel, so I must be able to edit them just like I do with my Word files”. Actually, the architecture behind a PDF file and a DOC file are completely different, not to mention the fact that PDF files were designed not to be edited in any way. That is why not even Adobe Acrobat is capable of getting it right every time, let alone the dozens of other PDF editors available in the market. iSkysoft’s product is no exception. At least, it doesn’t promise you full-text editing capabilities without screwing up the original layout, a department in which Acrobat Pro also fails miserably on numerous occasions. PDF Editor Pro does allow you to perform minor edits in the text, though the results may not always be as satisfactory as expected. The smaller the change is, the better the results will be.

iSkysoft PDF Editor Pro is great to annotate (i.e., add text on top of the existing text), combine, split, secure, convert, and create PDF files (from existing text- or image-based files). In all these areas this app excels as one of the best and most intuitive tools in its category, thanks mainly to its clear and clean interface that resembles enormously to that of the new MS Office line of products and its support for EPUB, RTF, Excel, PowerPoint, or HTML for the output. It comes with a set of other interesting tools and functions, too, such as its OCR capabilities (to make editable an image-based or scanned PDF file), its PDF protection tools (watermarks, password protection, Signature, etc.), its PDF form support (to create forms or extract their data, for instance), and its page editing tools to extract, insert, rotate, crop, replace, or delete pages. Other interesting features include image extraction, PDF markup, PDF stamp, and freehand drawing capabilities.

There is some advanced functionality, present in Adobe Acrobat Pro, that you won’t find in this editor, yet. Thus, no accessibility options (reading order, image annotation, etc.) have been included, and there is no access to the tags or the content of the PDF structure. Other than that, and provided that you’re not one of those who think that a PDF file is (or should be) as flexible as a Word file, this PDF editor is a highly user-friendly and a fairly comprehensive alternative worth considering.