You're a publisher. When you want to build pages, you use publishing tools, not office tools. This, in a nutshell, is the problem with ARTS PDF's Nitro PDF Desktop. While it's a competent office tool for creating and using PDFs—"designed and priced specifically for the business user" is how the company puts it—it doesn't have the right stuff for publishers. There isn't even a Macintosh version.

ARTS PDF promotes the program as a competitor to Adobe Acrobat Standard. This is a fair fight (which it will still lose on most cards), but it's like touting a big punch-up with the champ's sparring partner. For publishing professionals, the comparison that matters is against Acrobat Professional, and here it's no contest.

Nitro PDF's $99 price tag (compared with $299 for Acrobat Standard and $449 for Acrobat Pro) is good for a product of its capabilities. It creates PDFs of comparable on-screen quality and size to those made by Acrobat. And although it's one version of the PDF spec (now at 1.6) behind Acrobat 7.0, so is the rest of the world.

How Nitro Works

Using the Nitro PDF Driver as your printer, you can print PDFs to disk from any program. The icons of files from popular office programs such as Word and Excel (but not publishing programs such as XPress or InDesign), can be dropped onto Nitro PDF's program icon to achieve the same end. Nitro's controls over the "distilling" process are a good subset of Acrobat Distiller's, and as in Acrobat, you can save these settings as output profiles for later reuse.

PDFzone's Don Fluckinger sees Nitro as welcome competition for Adobe Systems. Click here to read his column.

Nitro PDF also has basic markup, annotation, watermarking, security and content editing (both text and graphics) tools. Importantly, it has tools for creating forms, which Acrobat Standard doesn't; Adobe reserves that for Acrobat Professional. Even Acrobat Standard, though, provides a range of powerful and useful extras that most publishers will want, including collaborative tools for workgroup publishing and document review, as well as Web Capture, which allows you to save Web pages or entire Web sites as PDF files. In addition, Acrobat's search tools extend to attachments and—significantly—metadata within PDF files.

When compared to Acrobat Professional, Nitro PDF fares poorly. It can't create color separations, for example, and it doesn't support any color management systems. It can't control or switch among color spaces. There's no pre-flighting, no ability to create JDF tickets, and no support for publishing standards such as the various flavors of PDF-X. There's no facility for adding crop or registration marks. File all this under "you get what you pay for."

Using Nitro PDF

Nitro PDF is fairly easy to use, once you know how to use it. But there's the rub. The program comes with a five-page "help" file that's no help at all. The program's manual exists online, and it's skimpy and hard to navigate. (Curiously, it's in HTML format, not PDF, so it's not downloadable.) There's no search facility, no index, not even any links among its sections. It's really quite bad, and it wastes a lot of your time.

An interesting innovation in Nitro PDF is the ability to create a PDF file from scratch, from a blank page. (Oddly, though, you can't specify a page size). But since Nitro gives you no page layout tools other than a layout grid, you have to ask why you'd do this in the first place. Without rulers or ruler guides, there's no way to place or size anything precisely. The only way to get an object onto such a page is with cut-and-paste.

Click here to view two slides of Nitro

In fact, you can cut any object from another program and paste it into a PDF page, which can be very useful. The new object simply sits on top of the existing page image, so integrating it into the layout may not always work in the absence of page layout tools such as those that control stacking order. You can also use cut-and-paste to export images from a PDF file, which is also very sensible idea.

Any object on a PDF page in Nitro can be rotated using a handle that appears on the object frame when selected. You can rescale placed images by dragging a corner point, but strangely, although holding down the Control key constrains the image's proportions, the effect isn't visible in the outline of the image box as it's being dragged—you can't see what your scaled image will look like until you've released the mouse button. It's a nice feature that is badly implemented.

Next Page: Text editing should not be so difficult.