1 Introduction
Last August 2012, I did a
quick review of the Infix V.5. See
http://damelus.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/review-of-infix-pdf-editor.html
If you look at the Top Ten
Reviews for "2013 Best Convert PDF Software" as of this date,
you will find that Infx is rated no. 8 but with the 2nd highest price
tag, next to the top winner Adobe Acrobat Xpro. However, the version
under their review was only version 4.
I have been using Infix V.5
since that time and have had no problems so far with the fulfillment of my
requirements. I find it very easy to work with. However, version 6
is an upgrade and will cost you the following:
Professional
edition - $159
Standard
edition - $99
Form-filler
- free
An upgrade from Infix V.5 for
the Professional edition will cost you $59 but you may be entitled to a free
upgrade if you have purchased V.5 from or after Dec 1, 2012.
2 List
of Version 6 Features
ICENI lists the following as
the enhancements to Version 6.
- Thumbnail view from which you can delete and re-arrange pages.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for converting scanned documents into editable PDFs.
- Support for filling-in interactive forms plus saving, loading and printing.
- Redaction in various colours with labels.
- Floating Transform palette for making position, size, scale and rotation changes to selected objects.
- New translations tools for quick translation of specific parts of a document, rather than entire stories or pages.
- Image re-sampling, automated cropping and grey-scale conversion to reduce PDF file size.
- View, Comment & Edit modes to safeguard against accidental modification of documents.
- Importing PNG image with transparency.
- Font, text-size and colour are now retained when pasting text from another application into Infix.
- Find & Replace in bookmarks.
- Support for TrueType Font Collections
- User-define stamp annotations.
- Multiple user defined signatures - define any number
of signatures for use when stamping scanned, hand-written signatures
onto a documents.
- New Distribute Across & Down helps keep your layouts neat.
3 Selected
features review
3.1
Multi-lingual OCR
This is supposed to work with
scanned documents in PDF. I scanned a
Spanish Bible to test its multi-lingual OCR capability. I opened the scanned document and went to
Document>OCR Correction>Start.
It had problems with
characters with accent. But this is true
even when I used the OCR translation of the scanner. The results were similar.
The results from a paragraph
are the following:
Original
|
Infix
|
miqueas 6
6 "¿Con qué me
presentaré de-lante de Yavé? Cómo iré a arrodi-llarme delante del Dios de los
Cie-los? ¡Me presentaré ante él trayén-dole holocaustos o terneros de un año!
7 Pero,¿ 6aceptaré Yavé los miles de carneros o los cientos de li-
tros de aceite que se
derramaron? ¿O será necesario que sacrifique a mi hijo mayor para pagar mi
culpa, al fruto de mis entrañas por mi pe-cado?"
|
miqueas 6
6 "gCon qu6 me
presentar6 de-lante de Yav6? 1C6rno ir6 a arrodi-llarme delante del Dios de
los Cie-los? 1Me presentar6 ante 6l tray6n-dole holocaustos o terneros de un
afro! 7 Pero, 6aceptar6 Yav6 los miles de carneros o los cientos de li-
rx 3d ?0 tros de aceite que
se derramaron? 60 ser6 necesario que sacrifique a mi hijo rnayor para pagar
mi culpa, al fruto de mis entraflas por mi pe-cado?"
|
3.2
Interactive forms
ICENI lists this functionality
as follows: An interactive form is a specially prepared PDF which
contains interactive elements like text boxes, buttons and lists. You can
interact with these, supplying text and making selections. You can then save,
print or send this filled-in PDF to others via email.
I downloaded an interactive
form from
"http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/LRRView/13983/documents/assignment_form.pdf
". I then opened the document in Infix.
Apart from just filling in
text, I also clicked on buttons. The functionality worked although it was slow.
I tried to save the file but
Infix crashed while I was doing this.
I reported this failure and I
straight away got an email from ICENI telling me this: "If possible could you please send us
the PDF that you were working on when the crash occured. We will of course
treat the contents of the PDF in the strictest confidence. A description of how
to invoke the crash would also be extremely helpful. "
Which I did.
CRASH FIX UPDATE: Iceni was quick in replying to me quickly. They said:
"We have fixed the crash-on-save issue you found and have made a few
other changes in light of the results we found after testing with the
document you gave us. The fix will be available in the next maintenance release.."
I am not sure if the
functionality included the ability to create interactive forms. I didn't
see anything that was obvious from the manual. View>Interactive form
fields (Ctrl-Alt-F). I will explore this at a later stage.
3.3
Thumbnails
THe ICENI blog describes the
Thumbnail as "ideal for working with long documents that span multiple
pages". It also said that you can get the thumbnails from
View>Thumbnails or F8.
Using the
Professional mode,
I tried it with
a PDF file with 52 pages. The View did not list Thumbnail, and F8 is not
a listed function. I suspected that this might because I had 2 versions of
Infix installed on my machine. I then unistalled both versions. Then I
re-installed v6 and restarted the machine.
This time it
worked. The View carried the Thumbnails option, including F8.
This feature is
very useful for working with long documents. However the thumbnail size
is fixed; it cannot be adjusted even if you widen the pane for thumbnails.
This means that if all your pages look pretty much the same, it will be
hard to distinguish which page you want to be on.
3.4
Image sub-sampling
I wasn't sure how to test this
so I just edited a pdf file with plenty of pictures. The original document had the size of
2558KB. I saved the document without any
changes. The resulting document was
2476KB. So it was slightly smaller in
size.
Then I did changes of some
text without really changing; I just retyped the same word. And I saved it. The resulting document was 2650KB which was
slightly bigger than the small file.
While testing this I came
across the crop tool. So I decided to
try that and so I retained a small area in the middle of the page and saved
that. The resulting document was 2773KB. I'm not sure why what seemed to be a smaller
document was bigger that the original. But most likely I really didn't know
what goes behind changes like that. The
cropping worked very well however and I convinced myself that this is a feature that
I would surely be using in the future.
ICENI quickly clarified the cropping functionality with this explanation:
"When you crop a page, it does not remove any information from the PDF.
Instead it just hides objects outside of the crop. That is why the
document size does not get smaller when you crop."
ICENI also clarified about sub-sampling saying:
"Image re-sampling is useful when you have high-resolution images in a
PDF, say for magazine publishing for example. In order to make the
document small enough to be useful on the web or to send in an email,
you can sub-sample the high-rez images to a lower resolution. The images
look the same on-screen, but take up much less space."
One I know more about Infix
and the sub-sampling feature, I shall be adding more reviews. At the moment, I don't even know if this was
a proper test of that feature.
4 Conclusion
I still have a lot to go with
knowing most of the functionality of infix. I wasn't too happy with the slowness in working with interactive forms and the fact that infix crashed while I was saving the changed form. My requirements are quite simple so I must say that I am quite happy
with using infix and I welcome the new features although it will be a while before I will explore all the features.
To get your copy of infix, go
to:
