Foxit PDF Editor Pro

Overview

Foxit built its reputation on being the PDF program that opens instantly, and the editor kept that characteristic while growing into a full featured tool. Editing text and images directly on the page, reordering and combining documents, converting to and from the office formats, recognising text in scans, redacting properly, building forms and applying signatures are all here, in an interface that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used a ribbon based office suite.

This is the Pro edition, which is the tier that includes text recognition, redaction, form design, comparison and the document protection features. The licensing has been settled ahead of time so there is no trial period and no watermark on anything saved or printed. The updater and the cloud integration prompts have been removed from this build, and the office plug-ins that would otherwise add toolbars to Word and Excel are optional during setup.

Editing a document

Text editing works in paragraphs rather than in disconnected lines, which is the difference between a usable editor and a frustrating one. Reflow keeps the paragraph intact as you add or remove words, fonts are matched from the document where they are embedded and substituted sensibly where they are not, and the paragraph can be moved, resized and restyled as a block. Images can be replaced, cropped, rotated and swapped without disturbing the surrounding layout.

Page level work covers everything expected: insert, delete, extract, rotate, crop, split and combine, with pages from several documents merged in a chosen order. Headers, footers, page numbering, watermarks and backgrounds apply across a range or the whole file, and bates numbering is present for anyone dealing with legal document sets.

Scans, conversion and comparison

The text recognition engine turns a scanned document into searchable and editable text, with a choice between adding an invisible text layer under the original image or replacing the page with recognised text entirely. The first is safer for anything that must look identical to the scan, the second is what you want when the document needs real editing. Recognition covers a wide language list and handles multi column layouts correctly.

Conversion runs in both directions between PDF and the office formats, and the layout fidelity going out to a word processor is genuinely good, which is where most competing tools fall apart. Document comparison shows the differences between two versions of a file side by side with the changes marked, which is the fastest way to check what a revision actually altered.

Forms, signatures and protection

The form designer creates fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, buttons and calculated fields, and can recognise the fields in a scanned or flat form automatically and turn them into working ones. Collected form data exports as a spreadsheet for processing.

Protection covers password and certificate encryption with per permission control over printing, copying and editing. Redaction removes the underlying content rather than drawing a black rectangle over it, which is the distinction that matters and which a lot of people get wrong with lesser tools. Signature support includes both applied signature images and cryptographic signing with validation of existing signatures.

What you get

• Paragraph aware text editing with font matching and reflow
• Full page management including merge, split, extract and bates numbering
• Text recognition with a choice of invisible layer or full replacement
• Conversion to and from the office formats with strong layout fidelity
• Side by side document comparison with changes marked
• Form designer with automatic field recognition and spreadsheet data export
• True redaction that removes the underlying content
• Password and certificate encryption with per permission control
• Updater and cloud prompts removed, office plug-ins optional

Inside the archive

• Foxit PDF Editor Pro installer
• Text recognition language packs
• Optional office suite plug-in components
• Interface language packs
• Readme covering the optional components and default handler setup

System requirements

Installing it

1. Unpack the archive to a local folder and suspend real time protection.
2. Run setup as administrator and choose a custom install if you want to skip the office plug-ins.
3. Select only the recognition language packs you will use, since they take considerable space.
4. Finish the install and set the program as the default PDF handler if you want it to open files.
5. Open a document and check the title bar shows no trial marking, then save once to confirm there is no watermark.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

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