I convert things to PDF frequently.  Sometimes if there’s an email or something I want to save, I’ll turn it into a PDF to make it easier to view/print later.  I make worksheets for school and forms for the household.  And I have to convert my books to PDF format for publishing.  By the time I reach that point in the book process, you’d think the hard part would be over.  Not so.  Usually this step of converting to PDF is my biggest headache.  So I was excited to try out Infix Pro PDF Editor.

Of course, once I had the software on my computer, I didn’t have anything I needed to convert!  (Gotta love Murphy’s Law. 🙂 )  Last week I finally had some things I needed to convert or edit, and I got to put the software to use.

Now, there are other things that will convert to a PDF file if you just need a straightforward conversion.  But as soon as you need anything out of the ordinary, things start to get a little hairy with most of the other options.  (Besides, you know, multi-$100-Adobe software.  Which is not in my budget!)  Infix handled them beautifully.

The first challenge I gave it was a template for school.  (You’ll see it within the next few weeks.)  I needed the first page to be landscape, but the second page – just instructions – I wanted to be the normal portrait orientation.  My other inexpensive (or free) software couldn’t handle this.  You choose the orientation and it’s just set, for the whole document.

I don’t know if Infix would have let me print it directly as I wanted it or not.  (I didn’t take the time to fiddle with settings and find out.)  It did, however, make it immensely easy to just make the first page a PDF (landscape) and the second page a second PDF (portrait) and then merge them together into one document.  I was a little nervous that when I merged them it might mess the orientation up, but it didn’t.  It was quick and easy and everything just worked.

The second challenge I threw at it was adding text to an existing PDF.  I created a fill-in-the-blanks journal that I wanted to sell through Amazon’s CreateSpace.  Except I really prefer spiral binding for such things (so it will lay flat), and CreateSpace only does perfect binding.  So I created a spiral-bound version elsewhere, and then uploaded the same files to CreateSpace – but I wanted a note in the front telling prospective buyers that they can get it with a different binding if they don’t mind going to another source.

Rather than creating another document, all I had to do was open the existing PDF and add text.  Crazy easy!

So far I haven’t had any issues with any of the other things that usually cause me trouble with PDF’s, either, like font embedding or page sizes.  It all just works.

(And if you want to see if it will do what you need, you can download a free trial.  Everything works exactly as it does in the full version; it just watermarks any files you save.  So what you see really is what you get.)