I have been looking around for a PDF editor as I was getting sick of printing a form, pencilling in details, printing it and scanning so I can send it my email. I decided I would try Corel Fusion because it was the cheapest the Top Reviews list for PDF Editors and I thought that my needs were simple. This was just last week and started playing around with that but I thought that there should be better editing facilities available out there. I could enter my details in a form but the process seemed too tedious that I thought I might as well just pencil in the details as I had done before.

Anyway I saw a comment somewhere in the net about Infix. Curiosity got the better of me. I thought the price of the Professional version ($159) was a bit top of the league for me. But browsing through their website I saw that there were three editions of Infix:

Professional edition - $159
Standard edition - $99
Form-filler - free

The form-filler caught my eye straight away and thought that maybe I don't even have to buy a PDF editor if can use their Form-Filler... but how good is it?

Infix Form-Filler (Free Edition)

To enter text in the PDF file, all you have to do is position the cursor and it will open up a work area for you to type. Infix overtypes on the original attributes - whether they are pictures or text. With Corel Fusion, it overlays the area you are changing with the new text - the background gets clobbered. With Infix it's a lot easier to enter text and to change the font attributes.

You can widen, shorten the area you're working on. Editing is just like using a word processing. One feature I would like however is to be able to move the work area into another spot in the document. I can't even move it slightly from where it was.

After playing around with changing PDF documents with Infix, I decided to just uninstall Corel Fusion and work on my forms using Infix.

But surely I should now try the other features in the other editions.

Infix Standard Edition

At $99, the Infix Standard Edition still looks pricey. So what special things can I do here?

Edit and Reflow

Edit and reflow was one of the features. I didn't even know what reflow meant. Now I know it to be the function of pushing out or pulling in text as you modify text. This means that the original text in the PDF files expand and contract as you insert, replace or delete characters. You are given the opportunity to resize your work area.

You can already do this function in the Free Edition but only for the work areas you have defined previously and only for your changes. If the characters were from the original PDF file, you cannot do that in the Free Edition.

This was a powerful feature - something I did not even expect from a PDF Editor.

I found a little bug working with Infix however. I scanned a document - essentially a picture - to a PDF file. I then opened it with Infix using the Standard Edition. As the document opened up, it defaulted to a document view of Fit Entire Page in a Window. What I found out was that when clicked on any part of the document and type in 'asd', some weird characters come up like ",rlri;b \tl'th l'L'L' t;fl^* --1jf ". This was like some alien has somehow typed some secret codes over my document.

This was a harmless bug as if you exit the document at that point, Infix doesn't even think that you had any pending changes to be saved. Normally you should just shift from the document view and to the Text Plus Tool to edit.

Other Features of the Standard Edition

There are whole heap of other features in the Standard Editon as below. But I will not go into any detail with them as I have not tried all of them.

Convert PDF to ePub, RTF, HTML
Convert anything to PDF using the Infix PDF Printer
Commenting - stamps, sticky notes, signatures, text highlights and more.
Photo albums - drag'n drop hundreds of photos to produce a PDF album . One good thing about being able to drag pictures in is you can for example also add an image of your signature. If you are filling up a form with a required signature, you can do it here without having to print and rescan your document.
Lines with arrowheads for labelling diagrams
Find & replace text - This is a powerful feature as it has the same functionality as a word processor.
Manipulate layers - show/hide/rename to make editing easier (partial)
Smart, automatic bookmarks (partial)
Immune from PDF viruses

Infix Pro Edition

This is the top of the range and will cost $159. This has all the features of the Standard Edition and the following additional features. I have only tried some of the features.

Join multiple PDFs into a single document. The joining of documents is a bit simplistic. You basically nominate the PDF documents you want to join. You can re-order the documents. I would have preferred something more visual that will allow me to insert other documents in any page that I want. Also this joining only works on PDFs. It doesn't have the option of including other file types like Word or Excel.
Translate PDF into other languages via XML - this is a great feature if you need translation as the text can be passed to the Google transation engine and the results passed back to your document.
Find & replace text - extended to include

                 - in styled text
                 - across 100's of documents
                 - in bookmarks & annotations
                 - in hypertext links

Manipulate layers - show/hide/rename to make editing easier (full functionality)
Redact text - simple, effective text redaction for sensitive documents
Smart, automatic bookmarks (full functionality)
Clone objects across pages - great for copying headers or anything you want to repeat across all pages, like the picture of your mother-in-law or something.
Renumber pages automatically - good feature but I will probably never use it
Create article threads and export their contents to HTML, ePub, RTF etc.
Remap fonts - fix PDFs that could not otherwise be edited or exported
Grids, Guides & margins - to make editing layout simpler.
Add and remove watermarks from pages user-defined watermarks - great if you have pdf documents from an external source with a watermark you just want to get rid of.

Summary

This review is based on version 5.2 of Infix. I believe Infix is a great product. It has performed well in all the features that I thought I would ever need. There is room for improvement in the the way the files are joined. It offers more than I need and it will probably take me a whole month to discover the features more intimately.

Get Infix! Click here.