Nitro PDF Professional 6 includes a powerful new way to quickly summarize all of the comments in your PDF documents. The resultant summary allows you to easily view all of the comments alongside the document’s contents – and, if you’re so inclined, print out the summaries for paper-based viewing.

Today we’ll take a first-look at this feature, including a quick demo video of it in action. If you’re not familiar with all our tools to annotate and highlight PDF files, then you might like to check out our full summary of features.

When comments are summarized using the new feature, each comment is displayed as a callout alongside the original PDF page, allowing you to quickly view the contents of each comment side-by-side with the original document. Each callout is also assigned an ID, and an accompanying summary table lists each comment by ID, along with the comment’s contents and other details. This makes it very convenient to view all of the comments at once, as well as flip back and forth between pages of the document to view comments individually.

You can select whether to summarize comments for viewing onscreen (as PDF) or on paper and can also customize how you would like the summarized comments to be presented. Some of the key things you can control when summarizing are:

• Grouping. Sort and group the comments by author, time added, type, and so on.
• Formatting. Control how comments are presented with font, text size, page margins and more.
• Smart (paper-saving) summaries. Only summarize the pages containing comments and exclude the rest – a great way to minimize paper use if you like to print out your summaries.

How to summarize PDF comments

If you have Nitro Pro installed and would like to try out this feature, just add some comments to a PDF and then follow the instructions below:

To summarize comments as PDF:

1. On the Review tab, in the Review group, click Summarize Comments.
2. Select the desired page range.
3. Optionally, click Settings to configure settings.
4. Click OK.

To summarize comments for printing:

1. On the Review tab, in the Review group, click the arrow below Summarize Comments, then choose Summarize Comments and Print.
2. Select the desired page range.
3. Optionally, click Settings to configure settings.
4. Click OK.

We’d love to hear what you think about the new feature. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Summarizing and Printing PDF Comments, While Saving Paper

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The onscreen PDF viewing experience has always had a mixed reputation. To me, one important and often-overlooked factor contributing to this negative perception stems from the variety of ways in which a PDF file can be displayed.

Unfortunately, with this flexibility comes an inevitable inconsistency, which can’t help but increase the possibility of a negative user-experience.

The problems are usually a result of:

• Publishers of PDF files not considering the best way to present a PDF file when it is opened (and not utilizing the ‘initial view’ settings).
• Recipients of PDF files not realizing that there are different page-display modes, which are fully controllable in all PDF files.

By taking into account the recipient when producing a PDF file, and understanding what you can control when receiving or viewing a PDF, you can create a better PDF viewing experience.

In this post, we’ll explore how the settings work and how you can use them to improve the resultant output. The settings are standard in most quality PDF viewers and PDF editors, but for today, we’ll focus on how they work with Nitro PDF Professional.

Page display modes

All good PDF viewers support four main display modes. You can switch between these modes manually when viewing a PDF file, but you can also set individual PDF files or your PDF viewer itself to always use a particular display mode.

• Single. Displays one page at a time, with no portion of the previous or subsequent page visible onscreen (my favorite). It allows you to scroll through a document much more quickly than the Continuous mode – when you hit the end/start of a page; you immediately jump to the next. It works well regardless of the magnification-level selected, and most importantly – it feels as though you’re working with a physical document.
• Continuous. Displays pages in one long column, for continuous scrolling. This is the default page-display mode for most PDF viewers, and pages are displayed in a single, continuous, scrollable screen – like a web page. It’s familiar-feeling, and works with shorter documents, but can become painful when viewing lengthy PDF files.
• Facing. Similar to the Single mode – displays two pages (a.k.a. ‘page spread’) at once. If you’re viewing on a large screen, this can work well. It’s also useful when previewing before professional printing, as you can view the spreads as they’ll appear in the printed form.
• Facing Continuous. As the name would suggest – similar to the Continuous mode, but displays the pages side-by-side. Like the Facing view, it’s best reserved for large screens and previewing page spreads for print.

Fixed page views

Most PDF viewers also have standard ways to display and fit pages in your PDF viewer. Like the page display modes, these can be changed and set manually as you view the PDF – or set at an individual document or document-viewer level.

• Actual Size displays the page at 100% zoom.
• Fit Width makes the width of the page fill the width of the Document pane. As screen size and resolution have increased, this view has become less practical.
• Fit Page forces both the page width and height to fit within the Document pane. Importantly, the page size adjusts based on the size of your PDF viewing application, resulting in a consistent experience regardless of how small or large your application window may be at the time.
• Custom Magnification lets you specify the exact zoom level that a PDF is displayed at upon opening.

Publishing a more usable PDF file with the Initial View settings

When publishing a PDF file, consider how your recipients may use the file. The more you understand, the more likely you are to create a positive viewing experience for the user or recipient. Here are some relevant questions to keep in mind…

Q. Are all recipients viewing your PDF files on similarly-sized screens, or are they likely to be quite varied?

Q. Is the PDF a long or short document? Will your recipients be reading every word, or will they be skimming through the document?

Q. Are your recipients sophisticated computer users? If not, is it safest to keep the scrolling in a continuous mode to create a familiar experience, like using a web browser?

Q. Are all your recipients viewing a PDF file on a large screen, or is the PDF likely to be professionally printed?

Q. Do you want to ensure the text is immediately readable, regardless of the recipient’s screen-size? Or, would you prefer the entirety of the first page is always visible?

Q. Will displaying the Bookmarks or Pages panel alongside your document make reading and navigating the file easier?

Once you have better-defined your recipients, it’s a simple matter of heading to your Initial Settings options and configuring your PDF file. To do so in Nitro Pro:

1. Click the Nitro PDF Button; click Document Properties; and then click the Initial View tab.
2. Select the options you would like to use.
3. Click OK.
4. In the Document Properties dialog, click OK.

Controlling how your PDF files are displayed

Most PDF viewers allow you to control and override the Initial View settings, so all PDF files open in exactly the same fashion. As a seasoned PDF user, it’s the first preference I customize after installation. To do so in Nitro Pro:

1. Click the Nitro PDF Button; and then click Preferences.
2. Click General and update your display preferences.
3. Click OK.

What’s my preferred way to view PDF files?

I set my preferences to Single page display mode and switch the default magnification to Fit Page. Over the years, I’ve found this to be the best way to handle the broadest variety of PDF files. Quickly scrolling through the pages is easy, and I can see the entire first page, regardless of size – from that starting point, it’s just a matter of flicking between the Hand and Zoom tools, and making good use of the scroll-wheel on my mouse to easily work my way through any PDF document.

Do you have a favorite way to view PDF files? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Creating a better PDF viewing experience

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Windows 7 is just about to be released, with October 22 the official launch day.

Those of you using our desktop-based products and planning to upgrade soon will be pleased to know that our latest versions are fully compatible. Nitro PDF Professional 6 and PrimoPDF 5 are ready right now, while the new, fully-compatible Nitro PDF Express 2.0 is coming very soon (stand by for that).

How to install Nitro Pro and Primo on Windows 7

1. Deactivate your Nitro Pro license. (See here for how to deactivate automatically & manually.)
2. Upgrade or install a new version of Windows 7.
3. Download the latest version of Nitro PDF Professional 6 or PrimoPDF 5, install it, and you’re ready to go.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Nitro PDF Software is Windows 7 ready

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It’s been a fun week or two for the team behind PrimoPDF. We were featured on TechCrunch (alongside our partner OpenCandy), PrimoPDF was the feature download on the Download.com, and, most importantly of all, we released PrimoPDF 5.0.

PrimoPDF 5.0 is the most significant update to PrimoPDF since it was first released and will save you time each time you need to create PDF files. If you’re a regular user of PrimoPDF we highly recommed upgrading now.

• Download PrimoPDF 5.0!

Release highlights include:

• Drag-and-drop PDF creation (the first free PDF creator to support it)
• Improved file append and overwrite functionality
• Faster loading and conversion speeds
• Windows 7 compatibility
• Improved user-interface

Undoubtedly, the biggest addition to PrimoPDF is the drag-and-drop PDF creation support that reduces the normal creation process from 7 or 8 steps to just one click. Until now now free PDF creator has enabled you to do it. You can get a sneak peak of how it works by checking out our recent video on YouTube that shows how it works.

Over the coming weeks we’ll go more in depth with v5, showing you how to get the most out of the new capabilites and advanced settings.

Of course, that’s not all for PrimoPDF updates this year. We have more Primo news coming very soon. Stand by!

• Download PrimoPDF 5.0!

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Free PDF creation (finally!) made easy. PrimoPDF v5 out now

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While some of you may be regular or occasional users of our free PDF to Word conversion service, in this post I’d like to concentrate on the extended PDF to Word technology in our Nitro PDF Professional product.

Our desktop product has the obvious speed benefit over the online service, but much more than that is its powerful settings for fully controlling the output of the Microsoft Word (DOC) or Rich Text (RTF) files you create from your PDF documents. While our free service does a nice job of handling PDF to Word conversion in general, what you may have come to realize is that it’s only best suited for some documents – Nitro Pro is quite different.

Nitro Pro is designed to give you far greater control over how PDF files are converted to Word, enabling you to produce Word files that best suit what you need to do with the file. The advanced controls enable you to answer key questions like:

• Do I need to make major layout and formatting changes to the Word file?
• Do I need the output to very closely resemble the source PDF file’s appearance?
• Do I need to find a middle ground between an accurate appearance and being highly editable?

All the controls in Nitro Pro are available from the preferences. Just head to Nitro PDF Button (aka File menu) > Preferences > Conversion > Word & Rich Text.

Page layout modes

The page layout conversion modes provide you with options to choose the right balance between the output file’s editability as well as its visual accuracy when compared to the original PDF. The best choice comes down to what you intend to do to the Microsoft Word (or rich text) files you create.

• Highly editable (with layout). This option produces a file that is quite editable, while still retaining the look-and-feel of the original PDF.  Text formatting, graphics, and paragraphs are all recovered, and the output file is laid out in columns to maintain visual accuracy. We set this as the default PDF-to-Word conversion mode in Nitro Pro as it is likely to be the best mode for most people.
• Highly editable (single column). This option produces a file that is ideal for making major structural or layout changes to the document.  Text formatting, graphics and paragraphs are all recovered, but no columns are used in laying out the content.
• Precisely laid out. This option produces a file that accurately reproduces the look of the PDF, and uses text boxes to precisely layout all the content. When producing a Word/DOC/RTF file that must closely resemble the PDF, then this is the mode to use. Of course, because it uses text boxes and focuses on the precise layout of page content, the output will not be as easy to edit.
• Use custom character spacing to retain original layout. This adjusts the spacing between characters in order to closely reproduce the PDF text appearance. This results in exactly the same text appearing on each line, while also maintain full text wrapping across lines for easy editing — it’s a very neat little feature and can be particularly useful in the Highly editable (with layout) and Precisely laid out modes.

Images in PDF files

Image options allow you to set how images will be handled during the conversion process.

• Automatic Anchoring. Nitro Pro  automatically determines the best method for anchoring images, based on the type of content found in the PDF.
• Anchor to Paragraph. Each image is anchored to the nearest paragraph, making content easier to edit since the image will move with the paragraph as the surrounding content is edited. This works well with the Highly editable (with layout) layout mode.
• Anchor to Page. Each image is anchored to a fixed location within the exported page, to precisely match the location of the image within the PDF page. This works well with the Precisely laid out mode.
• Convert in-line images only. Only images placed between words and on the same baseline as line of text are converted — other images are excluded. This works well with the Highly editable (single column) page layout mode when you’re planning to do major editing work.

Tables in PDF files

Nitro Pro allows you to determine whether or not tabular content is converted to tables in your output files.

• Detect Tables. If set, Nitro Pro will automatically detect content that is organized into tables within the PDF and attempt to convert it to tables in the exported file. This is most appropriate for the Highly editable (single column) and Highly editable (with layout).

Headers and footers in PDF files

Using these options, you can specify how Nitro Pro handles content that appears to be header or footer information. This feature becomes extremely useful when you’re wanting to do major re-editing of content.

• Detect and convert back to headers and footers. Nitro Pro will automatically detect headers and footers, and will convert these into headers or footers in the exported file.
• Detect and delete headers and footers. Content that appears to be header or footer information will not be included in the exported file. This one is particular useful for when you’re using the Highly editable (single column) mode and want to repurpose the cotent significantly.
• Don’t detect headers and footers. Header and footer information will be converted as normal content, and will be placed in the body of the exported document’s contents, near the top/bottom of the page. This would arguably best suit Precisely laid out mode conversions.

Dealing with problem text

PDF files can contain any number of different font faces, including ones that use non-standard encoding. The result when converting to Microsoft Word can be garbled text. Nitro Pro includes advanced controls for correctly extracting and exporting this problem text so it’s reusable in Word. It’s important to note that you must install the Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) component that is part of the Microsoft Office installer before using our Nitro Pro’s advanced text recovery. Once you’ve done that, here are the recovery options available to you:

• All text. If set, Nitro Pro will apply an advanced optical recovery technique to all text within the document, and all text will use the same font style in the output. This is most appropriate when you’re planning to do major reformatting after converting with a mode like Highly editable (single column).
• Just problem text. If set, Nitro Pro will apply advanced optical text recovery only to problem text within the document, retaining the original font appearance wherever possible.
• Don’t fix problem text. If set, problem text will not be repaired.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Getting the most out of our PDF-to-Word converter

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This week in our continuing free PDF software adventures, we have a big update to our popular add-on for Web browsers. PDF Download 3.0 has a bunch of new features with the biggest one letting you view PDF files directly in your Web browser without resorting to a special PDF viewer. It works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock, and is available for immediate download.

• Get PDF Downoad 3.0

Take the tour

Feature highlights

• View PDF Online. View the exact contents and layout of Web-based PDF files straight in your Web browser, without using a dedicated PDF viewer. (This is the major update to the product and a demo is included in the tour video.)
• Enable/disable PDF Download. Turn PDF Download on/off faster from the Status bar in your browser.
• Exclude sites. Use an exclusion list to automatically turn off PDF Download for individual sites.
• Improved PDF handling. More reliably handle the PDF files you encounter online. Use the options to detect PDF files based on the filename or MIME type.
• Better user experience. We’ve further improved the usability of PDF Download to make working with Web-based PDF files even more pain free.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

PDF Download 3.0 out now. Take the tour

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I’m pleased to announce that Nitro PDF Professional 6.01 is available immediately. All current 6.0 users can download the update now and those still considering Nitro Pro can grab the free 14-day trial. The release has addressed some bugs and improved the performance, but most exciting of all is the all-new PDF to Excel conversion feature addition.

• Upgrade from Nitro Pro 6.0 to 6.01
• Read the 6.01 release notes
• Download the free 14-day trial

If you’ve been following our blog for a while and enjoying our free family of products, you may well have already tried our PDF to Excel technology via our free online service. (The service has become extraordinarily popular in just a few months’ existence.) Both the free service and Nitro PDF Professional 6.01 use the same underlying conversion engine, technology that’s expert at making sense out of particularly complex content in PDF files. Converting table-based content out of PDF files is one of the toughest things to do and the technology behind our PDF-to-Excel engine is designed specifically to handle it.

Desktop PDF-to-Excel conversion

So what are the key differences between the free service and desktop version, you may ask? In a nutshell, conversion speed and control. Working straight from your computer you can convert individual pages, entire documents, or entire collections, in the one process — in a fraction of the time. There’s no manual uploading and waiting to receive your converted file.

But, really, it’s up to you and how you work, some of you might only very occasionally want to work with PDF files and find that our free services are adequate, while the rest of you might find yourself working with PDF files more and more. If the latter is your case, then a complete desktop PDF solution like Nitro PDF Professional might start making a lot more sense.

Comparing our PDF-to-Excel technology

There are a range of PDF-to-Excel tools out there of vary quality and price, but here’s the key questions I’d ask myself when trying to choose the right one for your work:

• Does the converter do fully-automated processing? Most PDF-to-Excel tools are unable to automatically scan PDF files, detect and then extract just table content — meaning you have to manually select each table to extract them or alternatively you receive an Excel file containing the entire contents of the PDF, which you must sift through to (hopefully) find your tables. Nitro PDF Professional automates the whole process.
• Does the converter retain the look and feel of tables? Most PDF-to-Excel converters don’t even attempt to retain the look of tables. Nitro PDF Professional gets right into it. The example below shows you the kinds of formatting we can handle, including fonts sizes and styles, borders, cell colors and row and column spacing.

Really seeing is believing. We encourage you to try out a bunch of PDF-to-Excel converters and see how well ours compares.

More info

• Upgrade from Nitro Pro 6.0 to 6.01
• Read the 6.01 release notes
• Download the free 14-day trial

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Advanced PDF to Excel included in the new Nitro PDF Professional 6.01

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Nitro PDF Professional: Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Nederlands

Following on from releasing localised versions of our popular PDF to Word and PDF to Excel conversion services, we have just done the same with  our flagship product, Nitro PDF Professional. It’s now available in German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. In fact, we’ve done more than localise the software, our Nitro web site is now available in six languages.

To check out the new sites, learn about Nitro Pro, and take it for a free test drive in your own language, please visit the sites below.

• Nitro PDF Professional (Deutsch)
• Nitro PDF Professional (Español)
• Nitro PDF Professional (Français)
• Nitro PDF Professional (Italiano)
• Nitro PDF Professional (Nederlands)

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Nitro PDF Professional: Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, Nederlands

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PrimoPDF 5

The first public beta of our all-new PrimoPDF 5 is now available for immediate download. It’s an exciting and very significant release for Primo and quite easily the most major update to Primo since it was released many years ago.

• Learn more and download PrimoPDF 5 (beta)

Those of you regularly using Primo will be pleased to know that Primo is now smaller and faster to load, has had a full user interface overhaul to make it easier to use, and now works with Windows 7.

While they’re all important improvements, the big one is the all-new drag-and-drop PDF creation capability. I wrote a while back about the key problem with all free PDF print drivers — that there are far too many steps to creating a PDF file. With our new creation there is no longer the need to open files and then print to PDF — with one click you can now just drop them onto the Primo icon and convert them automatically. So instead of around eight steps to get your PDF, there’s one! Primo is the only free PDF creator that lets you do this.

Of course, if you want to convert files the old way using PrimoPDF, you still can, but for many people we think the new way will finally make free PDF creation easy.

We’ve put together a quick video below showing how the new feature works and how you can quickly customize your conversion settings. Take a look and then download the beta to try it for yourself.

• Learn more and download PrimoPDF 5 (beta)

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

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A user just requested a new feature over on our Customer Connect site, to be able to display ‘future dates’ in text fields.

I would like to be able to format a field for x number of days from todays date.

Lucky for them, this is already possible via some custom JavaScript code, using the Date object.

Read more here.

This post originally appeared on The PDF Blog, brought to you by the Nitro PDF Software team.

Setup a field to display the date X days from today

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