soft Xpansion Perfect PDF Premium 5.5

Perfect PDF Premium is a comprehensive reader, creator, and editor of PDF documents which covers most of the functionality present in both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. It offers you the possibility of creating new PDF documents from Office files (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and editing and customizing already existing PDFs.

Wrapped up in a stylish interface, this application offers you dozens of functions related to PDF structured in five toolbars. The reading toolbar includes all functionality related to the layout and the navigation of the document. The View tab includes everything that has to do with how you would like to read the document (size, zoom, hide and show panels, etc.) and its appearance on screen.

The bulk of the program’s interface is devoted to its editing functionality. It covers three full tabs, dealing with the document as a whole, the text and other objects, and the creation and edition of PDF forms and annotations. Within the Document tab you will find all the extraction, merging, and extracting options, as well as the options directly related to bookmarks, links, headers, footers, attachments, and digital signatures. In the Insert/Edit tab you will find a full range of features that will allow you to alter the text, font, paragraph structure, shape, and layout of the textual parts of the document. Finally, in the Annotations/Forms section, you will be able to create full PDF forms to fill in with all the elements you would expect in this type of documents (checkboxes, radio buttons, combo boxes, list boxes, etc.). Besides, here you can add your own comments to the text, a personal stamp, or a sticky note.

Together with the impressive range of editing features available, this comprehensive application includes a series of external transforming tools that will allow you to send to your PDF printer any Word, RTF, plain text, Excel, or PowerPoint document. These transforming tools are installed and accessed as independent programs, usually located very close to your Perfect PDF 5 Premium menu entry.

All in all, this program can be considered a serious competitor to Adobe’s suite of PDF tools. Probably the only noticeable lack lies in the absence of accessibility-related features present in Acrobat. Thus, this tool will not allow you to add tags, apply OCR to images which include text, check the reading order, have the text read aloud by a synthetic voice, describe images, or alter the structure of PDF files created with other tools. The only text with reference to accessibility that you can find is a short statement in the manual giving a few basic pieces of advice on how to design a readable PDF document.