PDF-XChange Pro – The Office Companion

   Dear educators, corporate users and all the other professional document creators out there, there is a new version of PDF-XChange. We have reviewed PDF-XChange in its 8^th version – if you haven’t read that yet, we suggest you do that first. This new upgrade (in version 9) has features meant to bring it up a notch in terms of software features. The first visual impact is that the app now has themes that can be used to make it look more compatible with the generic theme of the operating system you use: if you happen to use the dark theme on Windows 10 and 11, you will certainly enjoy that on PDF-XChange as well. The interface is now Windows 11 compatible, with rounded corners and all.

   PDF-XChange has a new OCR engine, powered by ABBYY – which means that you will be working with documents and OCR them (accurately recognize the fonts in them) with the latest industry tools that are available. This leads to a higher degree of quality in recognizing font and writing in documents that you may need to convert from simple PDFs into editable documents.

   A feature that may interest you very much right now is the ability to add multimedia content to your PDF pages – audio and video files. This feature is really well implemented at the level of integration in a PDF file with multiple types of content. Clearly, this could add up to the PDF file size: the media files that are compatible may be already compressed before adding them to the document but if the media content is of high quality, the final result will certainly be worth the effort. Of course, such a file may not be easy to send through email (most email services limit attachments to 50MB), but it could certainly be sent through Telegram – it can handle large file-sizes. What this means is that content creators, like educators, teachers, corporate users or other professionals working with media resources could produce PDFs with multimedia features for classes, training courses, online guides and any other type of educational content that needs audio or video recordings or presentations.

   You can use MP4 video files and, for audio, you can use pretty much any audio file that Windows Media Player can handle – and that includes MP3s, FLAC or WAVE files. PDF-XChange uses a plug-in that embeds a “Windows Media Player” feature in the file playback process. There is one catch though – the only app that can professionally handle multimedia content in PDFs is the app that creates such files – PDF-XChange. The other PDF apps at the moment have issues in creating or identifying the multimedia type of insertions: they have either very limited or no capabilities whatsoever to play or render properly such content (Match that, Adobe, if you can!). In PDF-XChange you can enjoy such features, with the controls enabled – so that you can actually play, stop, pause, change sound volume, or for videos to be able to play them on the full screen mode (double click inside the video). The develpers must be appreciated here for their efforts to challenge the standards and offer to the users the freedom to create interactive content in a rather static type of file like PDF.

   Another great feature is comparing documents – it’s relatively easy to see what changes have been done to documents with similar content – imagine for a second that you have a form to fill in and that you need to see two documents that have been filled in by two people, to make a comparison. This feature can be found in the view menu – and with that you can see precisely what the differences are between two documents – and you can also select the type of content – images, video, audio or text.

   You can add specific headers and footers to your document, based on filename, date and other factors that are offered in the menu. This could be useful in the context of documents that are part of a list of document files. The tools that come in the PDF-XChange Pro package are also very useful in a varity of scenarios: the PDF-Tools and with the PDF-XChange Standard Printer will assist you in creating professional looking PDFs.

   PDF-XChange Pro remains the most complete packcage when you need to work with PDF files. It’s the “Swiss-Army-Knife” of PDFs, with an unmatched set of capabilities. The price starts at $121 for one user license and then you can pay $24.20 for maintenance period renewal every year.