This post is sponsored by Wondershare.
PDF (or Portable Document Format) is the most popular file format, mostly because of its 2 features – easy to distribute and hard to tampered. But what if you want to edit a PDF file? Well, there are tons of options available for both paid and free. Free tools would seldom offer what paid software do and most paid applications are expensive and resource intensive. Sure, you can take an Adobe subscription if you like shelling out cash but I have a better solution.
PDFelement 6 offers a wide variety of features including create, edit, combine, and convert options with extensive tools which make it a superior piece of software and challenges other contenders in the league. You can annotate files, add texts, forms, password, and attachments. I downloaded PDFelement 6 Pro and it comes with an OCR integration which sounds very interesting but I would have to check that first before advocating its features. Let’s see what PDFelement 6 Pro has to offer.
Create
If you wish to create PDFs from scratch, this software lets you do that and you can add any type of file in the PDF and it happily accepts and formats it to its standard. Once the files are added the software automatically adjusts them in the order you put them in. You can rearrange it as your requirement. The application has a Microsoft Office-style layout and if you have used MS Office at any point, you’d feel at home.
Once your PDF file is created you can save it to your computer or the cloud directly. Though its a PDF software it also allows you to convert the files in many different file formats like Docx, ppt, XLS, HTML, ePub, and image formats( jpg, gif, bmp etc).
Edit
Editing a PDF can be very challenging considering there are so many parameters to take into account like formatting, alignment, fonts, texts, attachments etc.
It has both basic and advanced options which are neatly organized and easy to locate.
Annotation
You can easily annotate pdf with this application, just highlight the text in the pdf and it shows a few buttons hovering on top, clicking the button adds an annotated marker on the PDF. Now, after saving the file, this marker would show up in the annotation list and you can jump to a specific part in the pdf just by tapping the annotation. Along with that, it offers bookmark capability, thumbnail view, and attachment.
With the attachment feature you can upload files into the pdf itself, so for example, if you have a presentation and with the pdf, you wish to show a video clip as well, you can directly open the attachment file and play the file without leaving the PDF reader. It is a thoughtful feature to have.
OCR
OCR capabilities are not included in the standard version so if your job calls for an OCR capable software you should go for the pro version. The OCR on PDFelement 6 works surprisingly well. To test the capabilities I tried varying qualities of scanned documents with skewed alignment and less contrast and it had no problem recognizing and converting it to text.
It even captures the fonts and makes the images to text. Though it does hang up for a while it shows the warning first that larger files require more processing to convert. So when the OCR is done all the characters in the pictures become editable and you can edit them as you require. The best part is as you edit the text the background where the image used to be is cleaned automatically. I must say the level of precision achieved in the OCR is uncanny.
Instead of scrolling through pages and pages to delete parts of the file, you can just switch to the page view and use the functions like extract, split, insert, replace, etc to easily trim your pdf file.
Form
PDFelement 6 supports forms and you can create interactive forms within the pdf. Just like a regular form printed on paper, you can create one in the application. You can add text fields, checkbox, radio button, combo box, lists, etc. It works like an online form and you can use it to collect data from other people.
Protect
Looking at larger corporations which roll out sensitive data in PDF files, a digital signature is a stamp of authenticity on your PDF which prevents misuse of the file. Adding a digital signature ensures that your pdf wouldn’t be modified with. Also to add another layer of security you can add a password to the PDF which would lock the contents of the file until a correct password is entered.
One very interesting feature that I found out in the software is the Bates numbering. It is a unique string which distinguishes a document from a legal standpoint and it also provides identification, protection, and automatic consecutive numbering. This feature can be very useful for people using the software for creating sensitive legal documents.
Combine
Annual Reports of an organization are rolled out as PDFs and they have information and reports from different departments. Collecting individual PDFs from each department and combining them to make a single pdf. This feature can be used where you have multiple pdf and wish to combine them for easy access.
PDFelement 6 pro makes batch processing of pdf easy. As you know PDF can also be interactive and store data within the file, extracting data from each file can be tedious. The batch feature allows different operations which can be performed on multiple files. PDFelement 6 pro offers Data extraction, Conversion of files, Adding Watermark and Bates numbering.
PDF Templates – It has a collection of templates which come in handy when you need a quick way to enter data in the file. Let’s say you have to plan for a wedding or evict a few tenants, This application has a library of templates which makes the whole process much easier.
Price
PDFelement 6 Pro is priced competitively and you can take the subscription for $59.95. You can check out the prices here. They also offer special packs for business and you can get 40% discount by clicking this link on the Standard version until Oct 31.
PDFelement 6 Pro Final Thoughts
PDFelement 6 is a great software, My expectations were not as high when I first downloaded it but it certainly surprised with its features and performance. The editing is easy and tools are right in front of you. The OCR feature is really impressive and sets the level up for other competitors in the market. The pricing is justified considering the number of features you get. Overall, I would recommend PDFelement 6 to small business and freelancers who primarily use PDFs.
