It’s a free version you install once and for all. Marketing a line of three or four pdf management programs for different audiences, ranging from the individual to the corporation, shouldn’t be rocket science. They deserve some sort of prize for managing to make horribly complicated something that ought to be quite simple. Their web site seems to be helpful and replete with information, however once you try to make some sense of it and understand which product does what, the nightmare begins. However, if there ever was a confusing product line, with blurred limits between the programs, this is it. They seem to be nice guys, offering good products (free and paid-for), and genuinely wanting to help. I hope the same option exists in PDF X-Change Editor.Ī final note about Tracker Software, the Canadian publisher. It’s hidden deep in the product, of course. Very unsettling, since you can never be sure not to use one of the verboten functions by mistake.įortunately, in PDF X-Change Viewer, there’s an option to de-activate the so-called professional functions, so you can’t trip the explosive within. You get all the functions in the free product, but if you use the professional functions (after the 30-day trial, I think) and save the resulting document, it will be smeared for ever with a watermark saying “you’re a thief and a lowlife for not wanting to pay our product” (or something on those lines). Just ugly.Īlso, Tracker Software, the publisher, has a very unnerving way of separating its free and paid products.

Some people say it’s not as good, and anyway they have an ugly interface.

I have investigated PDF X-Change Editor (free), which is the current version. Reasonably powerful and does the job (sort of), but also rather clunky and old-fashioned in many ways. I now reluctantly use PDF X-Change Viewer (free), which is a legacy product close to be abandoned by its publisher. But I guess when something works right, someone has to come along and break it. It’s a pity, because it was a very good software, light and powerful. I was done without so much as a warning, and it was very difficult to turn off. Then they turned rogue by silently dumping on you a cloud “beta” function which no one needed, and which stole your pdf documents from your desktop to hoard them God knows where and under what conditions. When large companies like Adobe and Microsoft resort to dirty tricks favored by fly-by-night developers, you know something is rotten.įor pdf management, I have been fixated for a long time on Foxit.

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