Review: Foxit PhantomPDF 6 shines in the paperless office - mannhaked1952

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Significantly less expensive than Adobe brick Acrobat
• UI is well-studied, and gives a choice between a modern ribbon interface or a classic menu style
• Well-suited for basic office use

Cons

• Forward-looking features poorly conceived out
• PDF Printer is RGB only if

Our Verdict

PhantomPDF offers a distribute of features at a zealous price, but you'll need that 30-day rid of trial run to make reliable it does exactly what you need.

Foxit Software's PhantomPDF (in both Basic and Business editions) make a just choice for basic office needs, but it suffers from an identity crisis once you make the high-end features. Foxit's download page makes the courageous claim that it is "Better than Adobe Reader and Acrobat," but a more accurate statement would be that IT mightiness be better, in precise specific circumstances that may or may not implement to you.

Many years (and jobs) ago, I was a Tier 2 technician encouraging Adobe Acrobat. I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Acrobat 6.0 Professional. What I want you to take off from this is that I am a veteran in transaction with both Acrobat and PDF files, and that I understand that the #1 question people require answered is, "Will this $130 software do what I would normally have to spend $299 or $449 to do with Acrobat?" The answer depends entirely happening what you would utilisation Acrobat for. I've formed my opinion comparing Foxit PhantomPDF against Adobe brick Acrobat Pro 9.5.

The claim is hiding in the title bar, but it's there.

At a glance, Foxit PhantomPDF more or less has feature parity with older versions of Acrobat: They some birth basic annotation tools, interactivity elements much equally links and buttons and forms, and basic editing features like adding/removing pages. There are kid differences in how some of the features work, but the differences really aren't that interesting, nor are they so one-sided as to make one a vastly superior go through over the past.

Where things get dicey is when you get at the advanced lineament set. Foxit seems to have added a routine of features that are only available in the Pro variant of Adobe Acrobat as a merchandising tactic, instead than as a holistic design decision, which ironically makes it harder to recommend supported those features.

The advanced editor looks fanciful, but isn't all that functional.

The most large instance of this has to do with impermanent with standards-obedient PDF documents. PhantomPDF can recognize and formalise PDF/A (archival), PDF/X (press), and PDF/E (technology) documents. But it can't createthem. On that point is an automatic conversion option, but if you don't like the result in that respect is atomic number 102 means to pickle it. The best the PhantomPDF printer driver can offer is PDF/A1-b support, just forget nearly CMYK or image firmness controls. The PDF/E conversion option is especially puzzling, considering that PhantomPDF doesn't support embedding the 3d models or dynamic content that the PDF/E data formatting was created for earlier.

Another example is the "Advanced Editing" mode. At first glance, this seems like something that might make up useful if you need to fix a PDF right now, you assume't have the original written document, and it was owing at the printer yesterday. However, the advanced editor is really difficult to use with precision, it cannot create CMYK objects, nor can it convert RGB objects to CMYK. This makes its current incarnation more of a novelty than a useful tool.

Watch the second air of text in the paragraph, and the kerning on the letters.

The PhantomPDF pressman device driver has other quirks connected its own. Documents that use common typefaces so much As Times Recent Roman tend to look worsened because Adobe's software substitutes their high-end rendering of Times for the comparatively low-stop variant that is pre-installed in Windows. Line spacing hindquarters vary importantly, which could prove frustrating when finespun layout is operative, such as a template Beaver State newsletter. Eccentric spacing was very subtly opposite, just didn't strike anything significant like assembly line breaks in my tests.

To set down IT other mode: The areas that PhantomPDF overlaps with Acrobat are just about even. PhantomPDF doesn't do anything that Acrobat doesn't cross. If you're stressful to get high-end Adobe brick Acrobat features at a low-end price, it's a good idea to download the 30-day free trial of Foxit PhantomPDF and perform a formal analytic thinking to make a point the software does everything you need for your occupation.

Mark: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/451988/review-foxit-phantompdf-6-shines-in-the-paperless-office.html

Posted by: mannhaked1952.blogspot.com

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