Soda PDF

SodaPDF is intended to perform various operations involving PDF documents, which include not only viewing but also creating, editing, annotating and securing.

The application’s interface is very similar to those of Office products, so it is unlikely for anyone to have much difficulty to use it.

In terms of viewing documents, there is not much difference between SodaPDF and other similar tools. It has several views and lets you manage bookmarks for an easier navigation. Besides, it supports visualizing layers separately.

Something that deserves mentioning is the possibility of creating documents from scratch or by importing them from other types of files, the clipboard and a scanner. Luckily, the application supports a long list of source file extensions. Yet, if cannot find a specific type in that list, you can always open a source file in its native application and print it using SodaPDF virtual printer. As to the scanner, the tool supports not only scanning but also applying OCR to make its text fully searchable. Unluckily, the OCR module is not included in the trial version. Other operations allowed include merging documents and importing batches of files.

One of the main advantages of SodaPDF is that it can export to other formats, such as Office, HTML, TXT and RTF. Not only that, the program is, in my opinion, one of the best tools at doing this, with practically no distortion of the original format. It is good news that recent versions of the tool can convert PDFs online as well.

SodaPDF is also great as to the way it facilitates editing PDF contents. Thus, the tool lets you edit text lines as text boxes and you do not even need to worry about using the same font. Similarly, you can extract all the images in the document, insert new ones or change their size and orientation. Moreover, you can manage pages by inserting, extracting and deleting them.

SodaPDF also includes other features that allow you to set user permissions to your documents and encrypts them using strong algorithms, like 256-bit AES. Likewise, it supports creating and managing forms, with a complete array of related objects. Finally, the resulting PDF documents can be easily shared by not only saving them to the disk but also uploading them to such cloud services as OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.

All in all, SodaPDF is probably one of the best tools of its type available. It is very versatile, user-friendly and stable. Although it is true that it is not as expensive as the leading software, it has an awkward pricing model, in which you initially buy the main product, and then you can buy additional modules depending on your needs. Still, if you already know what you need, it is a better idea to purchase the product as a bundle already comprising some of the modules.