I have written before about Nitro PDF Professional. It is a full-featured PDF program that is a less expensive option to Adobe Acrobat. The once drawback that has always concerned me about Nitro PDF Professional is that it does not include OCR capabilities. I saw on The PDF Blog, that Nitro has released Nitro PDF Professional OCR. From what I can tell, this appears to be the Professional version with OCR technology included.

Apparently, I was not the only person who was looking for this functionality. In the blog post, Nitro admitted that this was a highly requested feature:

OCR has long been the single most requested feature in our Customer Connect forum, where our users can suggest, request, and vote for the inclusion of features in Nitro products. As Gina O’Reilly, our SVP of Sales & Marketing said – “it was never a question of whether or not we add OCR to our feature set – simply, how quickly can we build it?”

I have not yet tried the OCR function. However, I am thrilled to see that this feature has finally made it to their product.

I am an unapologetic fan of Adobe Acrobat. However, I have also used Nitro PDF and find that it incorporates many features that I use when working with PDFs. In fact, there are some things that I prefer about Nitro. These include the menu (they us a ribbon with a fully customizable toolbar). I find this much nicer than the largely inflexible toolbars found in Acrobat. I also like ease with which you can comment and markup your documents. If you are looking for a program to allow you to work with PDFs, I suggest you check out both Adobe Acrobat and Nitro PDF, then get the one that works best for you.

Note that I have not yet tried the new OCR feature in Nitro. However, in the past I have received review copies of the software to evaluate.