Foxit PhantomPDF Business 9
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Foxit’s PhantomPDF Business 8 took the bronze in our 2017 roundup of best PDF editors, behind Adobe Acrobat DC and Nitro Pro. Version 9, which is an incremental update rather than a major overhaul, doesn’t make us rethink that ranking but it does reinforce PhantomPDF as a strong alternative to Acrobat.
Now there is a quality Adobe Acrobat alternative that you can trust. If you are looking for a solution that provides similar capabilities as Adobe Acrobat but for a price that you can afford, then you are in the right place. Now is the time to evaluate Foxit PhantomPDF as your Adobe Acrobat alternative. Nuance Power PDF has long been a popular alternative to Adobe Acrobat thanks to its comparable feature set and significantly lower cost. A recent cosmetic makeover only boosts its appeal.
Like Adobe Acrobat DC and Nitro Pro, the two PDF editors to which it compares most favorably, PhantomPDF employs an Office-style ribbon to keep tools tidy. A dozen task-based tabs make it easy to navigate the editor’s wealth of functions, while a sidebar in the document pane puts common functions like reordering pages and viewing comments a mouse-click away.
PhantomPDF provides all the necessary tools for creating and modifying business documents, including text and object editing, drag-and-drop page organization, form creation, and multiple annotation methods. It also offers several levels of protection for sensitive documents including passwords, certificates, permission controls, Active Directory Rights Management Services, and redaction. It also supports electronic signatures (including DocuSign), digital signatures, and digital certificates.
This review is part of our best PDF editors roundup. Go there to learn about our testing and how all the competitors performed.
PhantomPDF can convert PDFs to the big three Office formats (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), HTML, plain text, rich text, and several image formats. It converted everything from a single-page flyer to a 20-page business document without a hitch, leaving all formatting intact.
While most of these features are included with the standard version of PhantomPDF, PhantomPDF Business makes the most use of ConnectedPDF, Foxit’s format for sharing and collaborating on documents via the cloud. It enables collaboration features like multi-user document review, group commenting, and the ability to distribute documents to both internal and external participants. It also allows you to glean workflow insights through document-usage tracking that lets you see who accessed the file, what pages they looked at, and what actions they performed. A version tree lets you easily see the complete history of a document.
Version 9 adds a host of largely behind-the-scenes improvements, though a few noticeably benefit the user experience. You can now select a particular area in a PDF and export it to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, and Rich Text formats. There’s also a much-welcome find-and-replace feature for easily changing text in a PDF document. Foxit has also added OneNote integration so you can send PDFs to your account from within Phantom PDF, as well as “protected view” options to open files from potentially unsafe locations yet protect your PC from threats.
PhantomPDF Business 9 is available for Windows for a one-time fee of $159. You can get a volume licensing discount when you buy five licenses or more. You can also unlock advanced features in Foxit’s free MobilePDF app or Android, iOS, and Windows devices, by upgrading to MobilePDF Business through an in-app purchase.
PhantomPDF Business 9 gets high marks for making the often arduous task of document management a breeze. In both capabilities and price, it’s almost neck-in-neck with Nitro Pro. It doesn’t work with as many file formats as the latter, but it does work with the most important ones. If you’re looking for a reliable, easy-to-use PDF editor, you can’t go wrong.
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Foxit PhantomPDF Business 9
See itPhantomPDF Business is a strong alternative to Adobe Acrobat for a fraction of the price.Pros
- Strong collaboration features
- Accurate conversion for common file types
- Dedicated mobile app
Foxit PDF Editor 2.2
The free Foxit PDF reader is a lightweight alternative to Adobe's PDF reader. Foxit PDF Editor 2.2 carries on this tradition -- it lets you edit your existing PDF documents quickly and easily.
User interface: When you load a PDF document, the page you're working on is displayed in the center of the application; any bookmarks the document contains are set in a column to the page's left; and the properties of the specific page being displayed -- or of the row of text you've selected -- appear in a right-hand column. This properties column shows stats such as the size of the page and, for the row of text selected, the font name, size and color, plus the row's position on the page.
Working with PDFs: Text editing in Foxit works differently than it does in Adobe Acrobat X Standard.
When you double-click on a row of text, the application switches to a new screen that displays the page and row you selected. You then position the cursor to the point where you want to enter or delete text. When you're finished with your edits, the application saves your edits and returns you to its main window, showing you your document once again but with your changes in place.
When you select rows of words or a graphic, the selected area is surrounded by a rectangular border marked with eight anchor points. By clicking, holding and dragging any of these points, you can resize the height and width of the row of words or graphic.
Unlike Acrobat, Foxit lets you change text height and width independently of one another. So if you want to, you can stretch or shrink the height or width of your text to the extreme. This feature may not be useful when editing formal documents, but it could be handy if you're changing a page where text is presented more as a design element.
You can rotate text or images by clicking the center of the selected object, which turns the anchor points into arrows indicating clockwise/counterclockwise and side-to-side directions.
What works well: Foxit runs very quickly -- impressively so. I never felt slowed by performance issues.
What needs fixing: Foxit switches to another screen for each line of text you want to edit, and then it switches back again when you're finished. As a result, if you have several lines of text to edit, it will switch back and forth each time, which I found very distracting. Also, unlike Acrobat, Foxit lacks thumbnail previews of pages to help you navigate through your document.
Bottom line: Foxit PDF Editor 2.2's zippiness and surprisingly small installation file size (just over 4MB) make it ideal if you only need to make occasional changes to PDF documents, and especially if you're using an older or slower computer.
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