Foxit Targets Adobe with Free PDF Creator -- Redmondmag.com

The Schwartz Report

Foxit Targets Adobe with Free PDF Creator

There are plenty of ways to create PDFs without spending a fortune on Adobe's Acrobat Standard software. Of course you can save Microsoft Office files as PDFs. But if you want to generate PDFs that you can annotate and enable extensive workflow capabilities -- including the ability to electronically sign and stamp them -- Foxit tomorrow will unveil a new free reader that the company said rivals Adobe's Acrobat Standard.

While less expensive alternatives to Adobe Standard offer many of these features from Avanquest, Nitro, Nuance and Wondershare (among others), Foxit is upping the ante with its new Foxit Reader 6.0. The Freemont, Calif.-based company says 150 million have already downloaded a Foxit Reader, which it believes makes it the second most used PDF reader behind Adobe's offering. With tomorrow's release, Frank Kettenstock, Foxit's VP of marketing told me: "We're expecting that to go up significantly."

The new Foxit Reader 6.0 will include a Microsoft Office ribbon interface that lets users create PDFs from Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as and hundreds of file types via drag-and-drop. It'll also support Microsoft's Active Directory Rights Management Services.

Users will also be able to create PDFs by right clicking on files, scan documents, use a PDF print driver, and cut and paste from the Windows clipboard. Users can download the Foxit Reader here.

For those requiring more extensive editing and form creation capabilities, Foxit tomorrow will also unveil PhantomPDF 6.0, which allows users to reformat texts and manipulate objects within a PDF. It also offers extended search capabilities via the company's PDF IFilter, which lets the Windows indexing and other search technologies to index PDFs. Support for Evernote lets users attach PDFs to Evernote notes. Users can also edit scanned documents and implement optical character recognition.

Foxit will offer two versions of the PhantomPDF 6.0. The standard edition is priced at $89 and business edition, priced at $129, offers extended compression features, editing and security for enterprise users.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/15/2013 at 1:15 PM

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