Price When Reviewed

$74.99

Best Prices Today: WinZip PDF Pro

For three a long time, WinZip has been synonymous with file archiving and compression software program, so that you’d be forgiven in case you didn’t know the corporate additionally makes a PDF editor. WinZip PDF Pro is an all-in-one instrument for studying, modifying, merging, and collaborating on PDF paperwork. And like WinZip’s flagship product, it’s a stalwart answer regardless of just a few quirks.

The Windows-only WinZip PDF Pro has a deceptively advanced interface. Indeed, I needed to make heavy use of the person handbook that opens once you first launch the app to grasp and navigate all of the elements.

The principal element of the interface is what WinZip calls the Action Toolbar, a row of large-button “actions” containing the editor’s major features. The labels for these—Read, Comment, Edit, Organize, and so forth—are self-explanatory and make it simple to search out any given toolset. A second toolbar referred to as the Status Bar, containing a number of shortcuts to useful instruments, seems under every open doc’s tab. The icons within the Status Bar change relying on what motion icon you choose.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best PDF editors to study competing merchandise.

Michael Ansaldo/Foundry

When you open a doc, one other toolbar referred to as the Tab Bar seems, exhibiting the doc’s title in addition to one other row of icons with instruments for scrolling, reorienting, looking out, and printing the doc. There’s additionally a Quick Access Panel on the Home tab the place you possibly can open PDF recordsdata and add your most used options and sub-features as shortcuts. Finally, there’s the Menu, represented by three parallel strains on the high of the workspace, that gives additional choices once you click on on it.

To navigate an open doc, there’s a left panel that may be displayed by clicking the corresponding icon within the Tab Bar. Thumbnails of the doc’s pages are displayed right here so you possibly can shortly soar between them. You may set up and extract pages from right here and look at outlines, add signatures, and connected recordsdata from right here.

WinZip PDF Pro is loaded with all of the includes a PDF energy person wants, together with a full set of markup instruments, file conversion choices (all Microsoft Office codecs are supported in addition to a number of picture codecs), fill and signal capabilities, and instruments for securing delicate paperwork comparable to password safety and textual content redaction. But typically they’re not the place you may anticipate finding them. For occasion, the instrument to insert a picture in a doc is discovered below the Comment motion with the markup instruments quite than within the modifying toolset as it’s in different PDF editors. This coupled with the editor’s multitude of toolbars can really feel overwhelming once you first begin working with the editor.

Michael Ansaldo/Foundry

Editing the textual content content material of paperwork additionally takes some getting used to. My favourite PDF editors permit you to make textual content modifications immediately on the web page as you’d in a Microsoft Word doc. But WinZip PDF Pro takes a distinct method. You first have to pick out the edit icon from the Edit motion Status Bar, which surrounds every web page of textual content in a textual content field. Then it’s essential to double-click on the textual content field containing the content material you wish to make modifications to, which opens that content material in a popup window. Once you’re finished making modifications, you click on the Apply button to commit them and shut the window.

There’s all the time a danger that any edits you make to an current PDF will negatively alter its formatting—certainly, the primary time you edit a PDF in WinZip PDF Pro a pop-up banner warns you of this—and I didn’t like that I wouldn’t see that till I’d dedicated my edits. Fortunately, the editor persistently maintained the unique doc formatting in all my exams.

Should you get WinZip PDF Pro?

WinZip PDF Pro is obtainable as an annual subscription for $75 a yr. That consists of all its options, even those chances are you’ll not use, so it’s value contemplating how a lot PDF energy you want earlier than buying. You also needs to benefit from the free, no-commitment 7-day trial, which helps you to test-drive all of the options. If you want WinZip PDF Pro’s capabilities and you may dwell with its peccadilloes, it’s best to discover it a succesful Acrobat different. But we don’t rely it among the many best PDF editors.