UPDATE April 2016: Since this review was published, Nitro Pro 10 was release. Aside from performance improvements, there’s now the much-requested integration with Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. There’s also a new facility to request and receive electronic signatures and online collaboration tools to share documents and provide feedback with online mark-up and commenting tools. It’s still the best PDF editor. Nitro Pro 9 provides facilities for PDF creation and editing, form creation, digital signatures and ID certification, commenting, plus optical character recognition (OCR) so that scanned paper documents can be turned into PDFs that are truly editable. This sounds pretty much identical to several other products, though, so how substantial are the differences? A lot of the differences come down to bells and whistles or even personal preferences. Aficionados have pointed to slight ease of use deficiencies in the editing compared to the Adobe offering, but we find it hard to get excited about such differences. Given that there will inevitably be a limit to how much you’d want to edit within a PDF file, the features provided are perfectly adequate for the majority of users. Indeed, the provision of the familiar ribbon interface, a feature which isn’t universal among PDF editors and isn’t present in Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, will make many users feel immediately at home. Having said this, other features have clearly been designed to provide a sense of familiarity to Acrobat users. A classic example here is the extensive reviewing features (e.g. adding notes, marking up the text etc.), themselves perfectly self explanatory and easy to use, but with much the same look and feel as Acrobat. One notable missing feature is the ability to embed multimedia content in PDFs. Compared to Acrobat, the lack of integration with an online system for managing ID certificates might sound like a disadvantage. However, Nitro Pro 9 still supports ID certificates and you could always subscribe to a third-party management service. Indeed, although Adobe Acrobat links to the company’s EchoSign service, you still have to pay a subscription to use it, so it’s not a direct benefit of paying extra for Acrobat XI Pro.
