Nitro PDF Professional 6 review

Nitro PDF Professional provides all the core power the average office worker is likely to need; but it isn’t state-of-the-art power. Naturally, you’re not getting the advanced features such as colour separation and 3D handling that Adobe’s Acrobat Pro and Pro Extended provide. More significantly, Nitro PDF Professional doesn’t offer all the power of Acrobat Standard such as built-in OCR, and integration with Outlook and Internet Explorer for email and web archiving.

Moreover, through Acrobat 9’s built-in Flash support and its integration with the centrally hosted Acrobat.com, Adobe is currently in the process of reinventing PDF to bring the format into the 21st century. In fact, Adobe’s new focus on live documents, live collaboration and online access – the traditional Nitro PDF approach based on static documents exchanged via email round-robin – looks increasingly old-fashioned.

Nitro PDF Professional doesn’t offer leading-edge, let alone bleeding-edge support for PDF, but for the corporate market that’s likely to be seen as a major plus rather than a negative. And for its target audience Nitro PDF Professional offers the most important selling point of all: value. With a price of $99, Nitro PDF Professional is designed to offer 90% of Acrobat Standard’s functionality at a third of its $299 price. For UK users, Adobe’s rip-off policy, with prices approaching parity between sterling and the dollar, means that the gap is even wider. In fact, based on current figures, UK users can buy more than four copies of Nitro PDF Professional for every copy of Acrobat Standard.