PDF documents are one of those constants of modern life, so omnipresent in fact that half the time you hardly notice they are there. They might be ebooks, documentation for software you buy, flyers for products you haven’t yet bought, business reports, documents you need to sign, and the list goes on and on. However, creating complex and feature-rich PDF documents can be quite tricky without specialty (and usually quite expensive) software. Most office-style programs have a PDF export built in, but what if you want a little more bang from your PDF documents other than static replicas of your Word or Excel documents? In this article we look at PDF Editor for Windows (also available as PDF Editor for macOS) and how it can transform your desktop PDF creation at the click of a button.

Intuitive Interface

Firstly there is good documentation for the software on the website, but you really don’t need it. The interface needs very little explanation.

The screen is divided into large buttons for each of the main features. You can Edit, Convert, Create, Combine and Batch Process PDFs and choose from a variety of PDF templates.

Edit Text, Images, Pages and OCR PDFs

Clicking the Edit PDF button opens up a dialog box where you can load a PDF to edit. Once loaded you can edit and move around text and image boxes and also organise the order of the pages of your PDF.

The program interprets the file at the point of loading, and if there is any actual text in the page, it puts it into editable and movable boxes.

You can click in the text and edit, and it reflows to fit. Plus, you have full control of where the text and graphics boxes are on the page. Clicking on the box edge turns the cursor into a cross/move cursor for precise placement of the boxes.

If there is no actual text in the PDF to be extracted and edited by the program, you can optionally choose to apply an OCR on the file, turning any scanned text into editable characters that you can then manipulate. Note: the first time you use OCR you must download the OCR library in your language, which is by default English. After that it works without downloading the library.

Mark Up, Annotate and Sign PDF

On its own, the ability to edit the contents of your PDF would be enough to make PDF Editor Pro a great piece of software, but there’s a lot more power in this utility than first meets the eye. One of the most popular business uses of PDF files, for example, is to get documents proofed, annotated and signed, then returned by email rather than waiting for physical documents to come through the mail. With PDF Editor you can do every possible markup and annotation right on the PDF with the handy drawing tools.

Notice how you can highlight any area of the page, not just text areas. You can also position type-in fields anywhere on the document for users to fill with data.

As well as creating PDF forms with ease, you can extract a variety of data types from existing PDF forms. Just click the “Extract Data” button, the form will be scanned for data, and any data found will be extracted. You can also add digital signatures and position them anywhere on the page, even overlapping the text.

The Convert PDF module does what you would expect, it converts the current PDF to other file formats. You can save the PDF as a Word document or an image. Obviously there has to be actual text in the PDF for it to be an editable Word document, but you can always OCR it into actual text before conversion. You can also combine multiple PDFs, split a single PDF into many, or convert other text and image formats into PDF at the click of a button.

Conclusion

PDF Editor for Windows (and of course PDF Editor for macOS) is a feature-rich and easy-to-use piece of utility software, and it comes in two flavours – Standard and Pro. The Standard variety costs just $59.95 and contains all the basic features. The Pro version of is a little more at $99.95 but contains a lot more business-oriented and security features probably not of interest to the casual user. If you need professional-grade and flexible PDF editing and creation, then PDF Editor is a really solid, professional and cost-effective solution. It delivers great quality documents and is a solid platform for PDF publishing, both personally and professionally. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them in the comments section below. iSkysoft