Infix PDF Editor

Even the most sophisticated PDF editors lack the intuitiveness of standard word processors when it comes to basic document editing features.

Infix PDF Editor has been designed to be as straightforward as the most common text editors, allowing you to insert new text and images in the original PDF document while guaranteeing it reflows seamlessly into new paragraphs and pages.

The interface is fairly simple, both in terms of design and functionality – instead of the more fashionable ribbon design, the program goes back a few years to display simpler menus and buttons, just the way most interface design was based on before the ribbon age. You will find buttons and menus to change the text, the fonts, the size, the orientation, to manage the pages of the document, to reflow the text, and to auto-translate either a selected portion or the whole document.

This is probably the most interesting feature of all, at least the rarest one in the realm of PDF editing. It allows you to translate the original PDF document into dozens of different languages using automatic translation tools, with all the pros and cons of such utilities. Do not expect a perfect language translation, and do not expect it to work on all PDF files, as not all of them will have “true text” behind to perform a more or less readable translation. The results are mixed at best, but in some cases, it will truly make you save time and effort.

As for the editing tools themselves, this PDF editor does allow you to work on a PDF file with the same liberty as if you were using a Word editor or a similar word processor. Inserting text, either a few words or entire paragraphs is done in a very straightforward way, avoiding text boxes and similar half-way solutions. Fonts can be changed easily, as well as their size and color, and once you’ve finished with the editing, you can tell the program to reflow the whole text for you, so that the resulting PDF also reflows naturally when read. Each page is normally treated individually, as a standalone text box (just as PDF editors usually do), but you have the possibility of linking those boxes to ensure continuity (and text reflowing) when modifying the original content.

Additional tools worth mentioning are the color picker, the page management tools (to extract, delete, insert, and rearrange the pages of the PDF file), the snapshot tool, or the image insertion utility.

Regardless the program’s efforts in trying to provide a PDF editor that behaves like the most widely-used word processors (such as Microsoft Word), there is no way to treat a PDF file with the same flexibility as a TXT, Word, or ODT file, simply because a PDF is not built as a simple text document. To achieve such as tool, the PDF standard should change dramatically from an image-based environment to a text environment. There are no such concepts as “words” or “sentences” or “paragraphs” in the PDF standard – there’s only an “image” of what the text should look like when printed. Having said that, Infix PDF Editor does provide a closer simulation to a standard word processor than many of its competitors offer – including the mother of all PDF editors, Acrobat Pro – for a fraction of their price.