'No one has offered functionality to work with PDF without a catch until now,' O'Reilly said. Nitro is betting that if it wins fans for its free Reader, a percentage will upgrade to a professional version that the 10-year-old San Francisco firm sells for 99 dollars. 'There was nobody else offering free, powerful, no-strings-attached tools for PDF functionality.' 'We saw a big hole in the market,' said Nitro senior vice president of sales and marketing Gina O'Reilly. Nitro sells professional PDF software that competes with Adobe, but the reader released on Tuesday is the first free offering to let people do more than simply read and print such files. 'This stuff is a no-brainer but no one else has done it.'

'The whole point is to enable users to get the work done and move on,' Lorenz said. Nitro Reader also lets people scan signatures into computers and add them to PDF documents. Security built into Nitro includes letting users block access to selected websites, lock files with passwords, and turn off Java Script technology exploited by hackers to execute attacks. 'One of the big things about Adobe Reader is how vulnerable it is,' Lorenz said. Symantec recently reported that the number of PDF files tainted with malicious code skyrocketed in 2009 to represent 49 percent of Web-based attacks, topping the category. Nitro touted its reader as more secure than Adobe software at a time when booby-trapping PDF files have been branded a prime method of attack by hackers. Nitro PDF Reader was available for download online at. We hear from people that they have no love for Adobe Reader we want people to have a lot of love for Nitro Reader.' 'The fact that Adobe hasn't done it just doesn't make sense. 'Adobe hasn't adapted the product to how people have evolved in working with PDF files,' said Lonn Lorenz, who worked at Adobe for a decade before becoming Nitro chief product officer in 2009.

Nitro not only lets people read paperwork scanned in Portable Document Format ( PDF) but lets it be annotated, filled-in, or otherwise altered and then saved as files.Īdobe's widely used free reader lets people see and print digitized documents but not tinker with them, a restriction that can foil efforts such as filling in emailed or online PDF forms.Īdobe sells premium versions of PDF software that allow for document creation.

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