You pay once, and you own the software-no subscriptions or maintenance fees. PDFelement Standard (without OCR) costs $69.95, while PDFelement Professional (with OCR) costs $89.95. And it won’t cost you over $150 a year to use. All that and it loads extremely quickly and doesn’t make my computer feel like it’s having a heart attack. You can also create and fill out PDF forms edit text directly in a PDF rotate, split, and crop PDFs add watermarks, headers and footers and page numbers to PDFs and more.

It lets you edit and annotate PDFs add, delete, and rearrange PDF pages convert practically any document to a PDF convert PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, PDF to PowerPoint, PDF to text, PDF to image, and other file formats. PDFelement does what I didn’t think a non-Adobe PDF editor could do.

But for many users, these utilities are going to be prohibitively expensive and resource-heavy. Both of those are justifiable in the right setting-Acrobat and Bluebeam are packed with features, and I could not live without them in the office. These are both excellent tools, but they have two major drawbacks: they are really expensive, and they are kind of slow. When I’m in a corporate setting working for a company with a big budget, I get to use Adobe Acrobat Pro and BlueBeam Revu. Technical manuals, engineering drawings, white papers, exhibits, schematics, print proofs-I produce, review, and edit thousands of pieces of digital paper on a weekly basis. As a technical writer, I review a lot of PDFs.

Edit text in bluebeam revu