Nitro PDF, boosting your PDFs

Perhaps you are sick of the standard Adobe Reader and looking for something more. Well this is where NitroPDF comes in.

NitroPDF is a free PDF reader that provides what some would call advanced tools for free. It allows you to

create PDFs from numerous file types
extract images and text
annotate and fill in existing PDFs
type text anywhere within the PDF
and all the features of Adobe Reader plus more

As can be seen from the above image it mimics the appearance of Office 2007, but it also mimics common shortcuts. Tabs are also present in NitroPDF which allow you to quickly see what documents you have open and access them.

The benefits from my perspective as a student is that most of our lecture notes are provided as PDFs. I have a number of options for taking notes; hand written and the use of other software (e.g. OneNote). The use of this other software however, generally costs money. So if you're looking for a free computer based alternative for note-taking, you might want to give NitroPDF a try.

It is only available for windows at the moment (32bit & 64bit versions).
Download NitroPDF - http://www.nitroreader.com/

The video below briefly describes some of the features of NitroPDF.

For the techies, or people who are just interested in how a piece of software runs on their computer.

File Size
Basically NitroPDF quite clearly trumps Adobe in File Size.
Adobe 9.3 - 215MB
NitroPDF1.1 - 75MB

Memory Usage
This has been a minor compliant by some users that NitroPDF 1.1 soaks up too much memory. So I did a comparison against Adobe Reader 9.3.

In general NitroPDF had a higher memory usage on the test machine. The first three tests involved running the programs simultaneously whilst opening copies of a set PDF document. The final test (i.e. 3 PDFs separately), involved running each program by itself with 3 PDFS of increasing size (1MB, 3MB, 7MB).

From my perspective I don't believe it is unreasonable to have a higher memory usage if more advanced tools are provided. Memory Usage was perhaps not critical on this machine, but I can understand that if running NitroPDF on older technology, computer performance may be comprised.

Testing Computer Specs
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
CPU: AMD Turion X2 Ultra 2.4GHz Dual Core
Ram: 6GB DDR2
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 3200
HDD: Toshiba @ 5400 rpm

So why not give NitroPDF Reader a try, and see if it boosts your PDFs. NitroPDF also offer a whole range of other free utilities (e.g. PDF to Word/Excel online, PrimoPDF - converts printable documents to PDF files and much more) available from www.nitropdf.com.