PDFelement 6 Pro - PDF & OCR for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Mouselman

  Viable Acrobat alternative

  Both flavors of PDFelement 6 (and of PDF Editor 6, which is functionally identical but differently skinned) offer affordable alternatives to Adobe's clumsy, overpriced, "full"/editor versions of Acrobat. They provide most of Acrobat's essential features, with a UI that's slightly less annoying. But some "shareware"-feeling annoyances remain, and could be improved: (1) Keyboard support isn't fully localized for Windows OS. There are almost no keyboard shortcuts. And on a Pc, to even scroll through a newly opened document, you must first click it to give it focus, then click the toolbar's "Down"/"Up" buttons – no key combinations will scroll the pages. (2) Printing support for options like non-adjacent pages is rudimentary. The UI will fool you about which pages will actually print. (But you can work around this by opening your PDFs in Adobe's free Acrobat Reader, which offers annoying but extensive printing options, and printing from there.) The software is viable for workplace use, and I hope it attracts enough users to motivate the publisher to invest in fixing these missing usability and cross-platform details.

  
  
• By Lowraine

  Looking for an OCR? Look elsewhere.

  I was looking for an app that would convert images with text into searchable PDFs. There are plenty of free applications that do this but you can only submit one page at a time and the file normally needs to be edited. I was hoping to avoid that. I found this app via a Google search and downloaded it from the app store. As soon as the image I wanted to be searchable popped up, the app asked me if I wanted to use OCR. I clicked, “Yes”. Another window then popped up saying, “Sorry, you’re a sucker and you have to buy the pro version.” This is paraphrased, but who actually reads all the tiny text when you just need a simple thing done in the span of a few minutes? Not me. I click on the link to buy pro, thinking it might be a monthly service or something… Nope, pro costs $100. And as another reviewer stated… I’d also like to test the OCR before buying. Most apps at least give you a few pages for free, but this doesn’t even have that. Not worth the gamble. … I’ll use the free online applications and edit them.

  
  
• By AllezAllezAllez

  Improved by recent update

  For me at least, this is useless. I really though the app would fill an open spot in my workflow, but I cannot get it to conistently let me enter information in form fields. I thought it might be a problem in the forms from other sources, but I created forms in PDFElements 6 Pro and it would not let me enter information in them either. The same document, opened in PDF Expert worked perfectly. Likewise when opened in Acrobat Pro. At times, I can open a document and access the form fields, but once I go to another app or document and then come back it has again gone dead on me. To be clear. I can click on the field, but it then refuses to recognize any key strokes. Not a tab, not an enter key. For my purposes, this us good only for OCR. Any acutal use of the document has to be managed in another application. I have tried this on two different machines, with the same grim results. I guess this might be user error, but if so, there is seems to be little available support. I'd love to be proven wrong. ***Update*** After a recent update, my issues were resolved on both machines. At this point, the app serves the purpose for which I purchased it.

  
  
• By GZVA

  Reducing PDF File Sizes!

  I've been searching for a robust program other than Adobe that will give me reduced size PDF's when I'm sent giant files! Looks like I've found it. Picture quality isn't awesome on the reduction so far, but it's fine for what I need plus I haven't used any of the other bells and whistles this greatly upgraded version seems to have, so the jury is still out. In the meantime, I'm pretty happy with this Pro version.

  
  
• By SellingNaplesRE.com

  My work load has gotten easier - don’t tell the boss I said that!

  I work with contracts all day long and editing signing and sharing is always a challenge especially if I cannot edit the PDF. I receive PDF documents from many sources, they are colored, poor quality and sometimes hard to read. I just take them into Photoshop, convert to black and white and adjust the levels and contrast for a clean document. I then use PDFelement to OCR check them. It does a great job and a lot easier than if I had to type them myself. Even the form function helps me to create nice templates. I find once the document is cleaned up in photoshop it converts well into many formats that I have shared with co-workers with very few issues. It is difficult converting a 1990’s faxed document to a readable OCR PDF document in any program and PDFelement does a great job for me. For the investment in the program it was well worth the download. Thank you for making my work easier.

  
  

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