Review: This Acrobat competitor is piling on great new features, but it's also showing some growing pains.Adobe Systems created PDF; they maintain and grow the PDF standard, and they build the Acrobat programs that support it.
So why would someone buy a PDF-creation program from a competing company such as Arts PDF?
The answer, in short, is $200, which is the difference in sticker price between Arts PDF's Nitro PDF Professional (formerly Nitro PDF Desktop) and Adobe Acrobat Standard.
Nitro PDF Pro has been created for the office market, and while comparing feature sets is complicated, the truth remains that most creators of PDF files will be well served by what Nitro PDF Pro can do.
In fact, like Acrobat, it will be overkill for many.
Until we have modular software that allows us to buy programs with just the features we need (with an option to add others later), we're stuck buying applications that tend to offer more than we want (or want to pay for), and from this point of view the Acrobat-alternative Nitro PDF Pro is a welcome addition to the marketplace.
Nitro PDF Pro doesn't have all of the features of Acrobat Standard, but for many users that will be just fine.
It lacks, for example, Acrobat's excellent collaborative tools that allow a workgroup to develop documents together.
On the other hand, Nitro PDF Pro offers interactive-form-building tools, a feature Adobe only offers in Acrobat Pro, which costs $449. (Don't be confused by Nitro's new "Professional" label—it's not intended as competition for Acrobat Professional.)
Nitro PDF Pro lacks the tools (preflighting and PDF-X support, for example) that print publishers will need, but many web publishers will find all they need here, including forms creation (albeit without XML support) and support for Java scripting.
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Nitro's array of features is impressive and growing all the time.
The product goes Acrobat Standard one better, for example, by incorporating the talents of Arts PDF's popular Aerialist Acrobat plug-in, which gives you extended control over merging, splitting and concatenating PDF files.
In fact, you can create hybrid, customized PDFs from assorted file types in one fell swoop.
Nitro can create PDFs from most common office text- and graphics-file formats using drag-and-drop or through its Create PDF command.
For applications using more exotic formats (QuarkXPress, say, or Adobe InDesign), Nitro installs a printer driver that allows you to create PDFs using those programs' Print command.
The PDFs it creates are comparable in size and quality to those created by Acrobat.
You can create custom "profiles" to use when creating PDFs for specific purposes or from specific sources.
The program's level of automation is very good—it was designed with efficiency in mind.
Haste Makes Waste
Most of what the program claims to do it does well. Its main problem is that the company seems to be in too much of a rush to get it into users' hands.
Arts PDF admits that the program was hurried to market this spring, and although most of the early bugs have been ironed out by version 4.81, new ones continue to crop up. (The company's version-numbering is deceptive—maturity-wise, this is definitely version 1.x software.)
The company is quick to fix bugs, but it's annoying to have to cope with them in the meantime.
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For example, Nitro's Organizer is a single palette in which you can set preferences, tool properties and identify such things as type specifications.
It's a powerful tool. So powerful, in fact, that you can switch to another active program and the Organizer window will stay active in the foreground. Bad.
In tests, the program also revealed display problems, omitting on screen certain graphics or parts of graphics from PDFs created by Adobe Acrobat.
Interestingly, these elements are preserved in the file if, for example, you use Nitro to combine it with another file to create a composite PDF.
Acrobat will display these graphics in such a document, but Nitro won't.
Arts PDF says both bugs will be repaired soon.
The program's minimum hardware requirements are also questionable. Although the documentation claims that it will run on a PC with a 233-MHz Pentium II processor, when the program was tested on an IBM 350-MHz Pentium II, it ran so slowly as to be unusable. (Arts PDF says it's reviewing its minimum platform standards.)
Next Page: Arts PDF enters PDF Wars and shoots itself in the foot.
Help Wanted
There are also features that may not qualify as bugs, but that I would be loath to boast of as features.
For example, the program now ships with a longer (electronic) manual, but it has no index.
Also, the page numbers in the table of contents are wrong and the content is still pretty skimpy.
The program allows you to design pages (such as forms) from scratch, but gives you no rulers or alignment guides other than a page grid. (And once you turn the grid on, it remains on for all the documents you have open, not just the one you wanted it for.)
In Acrobat, you can edit the text of a PDF file using your choice of OpenType, TrueType or PostScript fonts, but in Nitro you can only use TrueType.
This dramatically undercuts the usefulness of Nitro's text editing tools.
One intriguing feature of the program is its ability to convert a PDF file into Microsoft Word's .doc format.
It sounds good, but this is not a feature to buy the program for—it simply doesn't work very well.
In tests it made absolute hash out of a lightly illustrated book chapter, merging captions into the main text, massacring margins, introducing spurious type colors and point sizes, distorting and misplacing images, and putting a return at the end of every text line, so even the simplest text passages would have to be heavily edited.
The converted document was completely unusable.
In successive trials with the same PDF file, the results were different each time, but none of the .doc files could be salvaged.
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On a 300-page essentially all-text document (with only a few screen shots here and there, which didn't survive intact) the conversion was better, but underscores and table rules overprinted the type, line spacing was often botched, and because every line ended with a return (making each line its own paragraph) features such as hanging indents required extensive of handwork to make right.
Although the PDF-to-Word feature is supposed to work with versions of Word back to Word 97, in tests it would not work at all with this version of Word.
As of this writing, the company has yet to provide a solution to this problem.
Because Nitro relies on interaction with Word's API (Application Programming Interface) for the conversion to take place, if you don't have Word, you're out of luck. Word Perfect users take note.
Finally, while Nitro is good at creating PDFs, for viewing them you'll be happier with Adobe Reader, which has its own internal type-rendering technology that creates better results than Nitro.
Simply put, Acrobat's type is crisper and denser, easier on the eyes.
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Conclusion
In buying PDF software, the conservative choice is to buy from Adobe.
A big question, though, is whether your budget can afford such conservatism.
Another is whether you can put up with Nitro's shortcomings until they've been put right.
The best course of action is to download a 30-day-trial version of Nitro PDF Pro and see if it does what you need.
The trial version is fully functional, and in my tests I found no reason to believe that the PDF files that Nitro creates are in any way inferior to Acrobat's.
So there's no reason not to give Nitro a trial workout. Program updates appear with great frequency.
Arts PDF has put itself on the front of what it calls the "PDF Wars." But in the opening skirmishes it has shot itself in the foot with a lack of quality control.
The company has assembled a formidable PDF toolkit in Nitro, but now it needs to focus on putting right what's in it before piling on new features.
When that's done, Acrobat will indeed have a run for its money.
