PDF-XChange Editor

The word editor in this product’s name carries an expectation it cannot entirely meet, and understanding why explains most of what to expect from any PDF editor. PDF-XChange Editor does more with a PDF than any reader, and a PDF is still not a document in the way a word processor file is.

PDF-XChange Editor does everything around the text well. Annotation, highlighting, comments, stamps, form filling, page reordering, splitting, merging, digital signatures and recognition of text in scanned pages.

What it does with limits is the thing people came for, which is changing the words on the page.

Why editing text in a PDF is awkward

This is the PDF-XChange Editor fact that saves the most disappointment, and it is not a fault in this software.

A PDF describes where marks go on a page. Each piece of text carries a position, a font and a size, and there is no concept of a paragraph flowing from one line to the next. Nothing in the file says these words belong together.

So editing a sentence means the surrounding text does not move to accommodate it. Making a line longer pushes it off the margin rather than wrapping, and the software must guess where the paragraph boundaries were to do anything better.

This handles that guessing better than most, grouping text into editable blocks and reflowing within them. It still meets the cases where the original was produced in a way that defeats grouping, and where the font is not installed on your machine so a substitute is used and the appearance changes.

The honest guidance is to edit the source document if you have it, and to treat PDF text editing as correcting a typo rather than rewriting a page. For producing PDFs from a document instead, LibreOffice exports directly and the result needs no editing afterwards.

Text recognition on scanned pages

PDF-XChange Editor includes recognition rather than selling it separately, which is the feature that turns a scan into something useful.

A scanned page is an image. Nothing in it is searchable, selectable or copyable until the characters have been recognised and written into the file as an invisible layer behind the picture.

Once that has happened, searching works, text can be selected and copied, and the page can be found by content rather than by remembering which folder it went into. For a stack of scanned documents nobody indexed, that is the difference between an archive and a pile.

Accuracy depends on the scan far more than on the software. A clean page at reasonable resolution recognises almost perfectly, and a crooked photograph of a page under poor light produces results that need checking word by word.

The annotation side is where it earns its place

For reviewing rather than authoring, PDF-XChange Editor is at its strongest and the reason many people keep it installed.

Comments, highlighting, text boxes, arrows, measurements, stamps all behave properly, and the comment list gives an overview of every mark in a document rather than requiring you to find them by scrolling.

Filling forms works on both proper interactive forms and the flat ones that are simply pictures of a form, where a typewriter tool places text anywhere on the page.

It also opens large documents noticeably faster than the mainstream reader, which sounds minor until you work with a few hundred pages regularly. Adobe Acrobat Reader remains the reference for compatibility and is considerably heavier for the same reading.

Where the requirement is only reading, quickly, with nothing else attached, a minimal reader that opens instantly does that one job better than anything with an editor in it.

The watermark arrangement

This deserves stating clearly, because it is how PDF-XChange Editor handles its unpaid tier and it catches people out.

Rather than disabling the advanced features, the unpaid version lets you use them and marks the output. Viewing, annotating, filling forms are all unrestricted, and certain operations produce a document carrying a watermark unless licensed.

The consequence is that you can do an hour of work and discover the result is marked. Establishing which operations trigger it before starting a real task is worth the five minutes, because the alternative is repeating the work after paying.

As an arrangement it is more generous than a time limit and less predictable than a clear feature split, and either way the free capability covers reading, reviewing and form filling completely.

Creating PDFs rather than editing them

PDF-XChange Editor brings a printer driver alongside, so anything that can print can produce a PDF.

That covers the common requirement of turning a web page, an email or a spreadsheet into a fixed document, and it is the route to a PDF that does not need editing because it was made correctly to begin with.

PDFCreator does the same job on its own for anybody who wants the creation without the editor, with profiles for different output settings.

Conclusion

PDF-XChange Editor is an excellent reviewer and a competent editor, and the order of those two words matters. Annotation, comments, form filling and text recognition are all handled properly, and it opens long documents faster than the software most people already have.

Set expectations on the editing. A PDF is a description of a printed page rather than a document, which limits what any editor can do with the words on it, and this one handles that better than most without escaping it. Check which operations watermark the output before committing to a real task, and edit the original document instead whenever you still have it.