PDF-XChange Pro

Overview

The dominant document reader is slow, heavy, and increasingly a delivery vehicle for a subscription. This suite does everything most people need from that category in a program that opens instantly and stays out of the way. It is three components together: the editor with the full annotation and editing feature set, the command line and batch tools package, and a virtual printer that produces documents from anything that can print.

This build has the license applied across all three components, so there is no stamped watermark on saved output, no trial banner and no feature that turns out to be disabled when you reach for it. It handles very large documents faster than the alternatives, which becomes obvious the first time you open a thousand page technical manual.

Reading, annotation and review

The viewer is fast on documents where other readers stall, with proper text selection, search across an entire folder of documents rather than one at a time, and a thumbnail and bookmark navigation panel. Multiple documents open as tabs in one window, and two can be tiled for comparison with synchronised scrolling.

Annotation covers highlighting, notes, stamps, drawing tools, measurement for scaled drawings, and text callouts. Comments carry author and time information and can be summarised into a list or exported so a review cycle happens outside the document. All annotation is standard so it appears correctly in other readers.

Editing, forms and text recognition

Direct content editing changes the text and images inside a document rather than layering corrections on top, with reflow inside a paragraph and font matching where the font is embedded. Pages can be inserted, deleted, rotated, cropped, extracted and reordered, and documents can be split or merged with bookmarks preserved.

Forms can be filled and, more usefully, created, with the standard field types, validation, calculation and submission actions. Optical character recognition runs over scanned pages and produces a searchable text layer underneath the original image, so the scan looks unchanged but is fully searchable and selectable. The recognition handles multi column layouts and tables better than most, and language packs cover the major scripts.

The printer, batch processing and security

The virtual printer appears in every application's print dialog and produces a document from anything, with control over compression, embedded fonts, and whether the output is optimised for screen, print or archival compliance. It can also append to an existing document rather than always creating a new one.

Batch processing applies an operation across hundreds of files at once from a script or the command line tools, which is how bulk conversion, stamping or recognition gets done without opening anything. Security features cover password protection, permission restrictions, digital signature application and verification, and redaction that genuinely removes the underlying content rather than drawing a black box over it.

What you get

• Fast viewer that handles very large documents without stalling
• Full annotation set with measurement tools and comment export
• Direct text and image editing with paragraph reflow
• Page insert, delete, extract, reorder, split and merge with bookmarks preserved
• Form filling and form creation with validation and calculation
• Optical character recognition producing a searchable layer under the scan
• Virtual printer producing documents from any application
• Batch and command line processing across hundreds of files
• Password protection, digital signatures and true redaction

Inside the archive

• PDF-XChange Editor Plus
• PDF-Tools package for batch and command line operations
• Virtual printer driver, standard edition
• Optical character recognition language packs
• Install notes covering component selection

System requirements

Installing it

1. Unpack the archive to a local folder.
2. Run setup and select all three components unless you specifically do not want the printer.
3. Choose which optical character recognition languages to install, since installing all of them is unnecessary bulk.
4. Set the editor as the default document handler if you want it to open documents on double click.
5. Save a test document and confirm no watermark appears on the output.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

Comments

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