PDF Suite

Don’t be fooled by the new Acrobat Reader that Adobe pushes at you every chance they get. Sure, its free for the download. But its also passive software, letting you only peruse Postscript Document File (PDF) publications that have been created with a higher species of Acrobat. If you want to extract pages from the PDF, add pages, stamp it with “Approved” or “Burn After Reading,” do any sort of editing, or if you want to create your own PDF documents, first you’ll have to shell out $95 to $450 for some other version of Acrobat capable of creating PDFs.

Or get Pdf995 Suite. It’s not exactly free. It depends on how much value you put in being made to look at a nagging ad for Pdf955 and other software produced by the same software company. In return, you get the ability to create standard PDF documents by sending the originals documents to a virtual printer. The virtual machine produces the PDF file as the document would look if it had come out of a real printer. The setup lets you product PDFs from any software that can print hard copy. Another module, PdfEdit995, lets you combine separate documents in one PDF, insert comments and bookmarks, rubber stamps, convert from PDG to HTML, or, for just the text, to a Word .doc. Another module, Signature995, encrypts PDFs and adds digital signatures.

Despite such a panoply of PDF pleasures, it’s conceivable you may get weary of watching the same ads each time you use the programs. Then banish all the ads by buying a couple of the modules that make up the suite. Each is $9.95. Or, for 20 dollars more you can buy every program in the company’s arsenal, including such worthy utilities as OmniFormat, which lets you convert among 75 file formats, Photoedit 995, which provides the usual necessary touch-up tools, BackItUp995, Zip995 , and Ftp995, which do exactly what you’d think they would, and a half dozen others. The complete package is $29.95.

–Ron White