Ashampoo PDF Free Review

Installing PDF Free

Installing PDF Free is quick and easy, this begins by visiting the Ashampoo Website where the installer can be downloaded for free!

At just over 300MB this is quite a big download so might take a little time to get going with, once running however, the software was installed in a just a matter of seconds!

The final part of the install will be entering your Ashampoo account details to activate the licence, if you don’t yet have an Ashampoo account then don’t worry, it is quick and easy to sign up for one and all that is needed is a valid email address!

With registration complete, PDF Free will now be ready to go!

Working with and Editing PDFs

When opening PDF Free for the first time we will be greeted by a “welcome” document which is already opened up in the application, this is great for initially testing out the software and getting a feel for what it can do.

Editing any loaded PDF document, such as this welcome document, is as simple as clicking on the text to be edited and then typing as would be done in any traditional word processor application. PDF Free even gives us the ability to enhance text and make it stand out thanks to the ability to change font and styles (such as making text bold) in addition to making certain text stand out thanks to the text highlighting features as can be seen below:

As well as simply editing existing text, we can also add new blocks of text to any part of the PDF document simply by selecting the text tool form the menu and defining the area where the new text is to be added.

Moving on from editing text and PDF Free also provides a good selection of commenting tools, these are ideal for annotating a PDF document and adding useful information in a way which will both be time and date stamped and will, in most cases, easily stand out from the original PDF document.

In addition to document editing itself, any edits which are made to the underlying file are also logged, these can be seen via the change log box which is available under the document menu and can give insight into the changes made to a document.

One of the biggest things which does seem to missing when it comes to adding content, in this section, is the ability to add images from a file into the PDF document. This is, of course, only a small thing which wont affect too many users, but nevertheless something to point out for those which might need such functionality.

Merging, Inserting, Splitting & Extracting PDFs

Moving away form the basic editing of PDF files we can next start looking at the functionality which is required for manipulating the PDF document itself. Such functionality can include inserting new pages into the document, deleting existing pages, reordering and re-sizing pages and also extracting specified pages into individual PDF files amongst other similar operations.

Sadly, when it comes to manipulating PDF documents, this is where we start to see some of the first notable limitations of PDF Free appear (in case you are unaware, Ashampoo also produce a fully featured editor called PDF Pro 2 which can, naturally, do a lot more than PDF Free can).

A look at the “Pages” menu (as can be seen above) and we can see the available options for altering this document, note how the ability to add new pages and import directly from a scanner are both absent in this free version (yet both are available in the PDF Pro 2 version).

Securing PDF Documents

Another great feature of PDF Free is its ability to secure and even encrypt any PDF documents which are edited using the application.

Starting off at the Document Security box (accessible from the “Document” menu) and we see the available security options and the strength of encryption which will be applied, these currently go up to and include full AES-256bit encryption of the document.

Once any of the encryption options are applied, we can then go about specifying other security features which are to be applied to the document, these include allowing or disallowing editing, printing, searching metadata and copying data from the document amongst other things.

As can be seen above, we have the option of specifying two individual passwords when activating these security features. One password allows others users of the document to open, read and possibly event print the contents within and another password allows permissions within the document to be changed (a kind of master password, if you will).

NB – If you do make use of these security options it is important to remember these passwords, they cannot be reset!

PDF Free vs PDF Pro 2

As was mentioned a little while ago, PDF Free from Ashampoo is accompanied by a fully featured PDF editing suite called PDF Pro 2 (you can read our review of PDF Pro 2 by clicking here). Whilst many of the core PDF editing features are covered by PDF Free, it is, as would be expected, missing some of the functionality of the premium version.

On the editing front there is actually little difference between both versions, as such, if basic editing is all you need from a PDF editing tool then PDF Free will go a long way. Moving a little bit further on and we do see certain tools missing from the free version which relate to the manipulation of documents, these include no ability to create new pages within the document nor any ability to imports directly from a document scanner as we can do in PDF Pro 2.

Other missing features, amongst other things, include the lack of any find and replace tool (we just have find on its own).