pdfMechanic

pdfMechanic is a simple-to-use program that allows you to perform several operations on your PDF files, including merging and extraction.

This is a portable product, so installing pdfMechanic is not required. It means that you can place the tool on a removable device (like a USB flash drive) and directly run its executable file on any computer. What's more important is the fact that the Windows registry keys are not altered.

The interface of the program is plain and easy to work with. Documents can be imported into the file list by using either the file browser or the "drag and drop" functionality. Here you can check out the source path of each item. Once you specify the output destination and filename, you can start the merging procedure.

Extracting pages from PDFs is similar; you can specify a page range, single or random pages. You can convert PDFs to other file types (TXT, HTML or XML), as well as rotate pages clockwise or counter-clockwise. In the "Settings" menu you can either encrypt or decrypt the PDFs.

The PDF processing program requires a moderate amount of system resources to finish a task in reasonable time. It is very responsive and preserves a good text quality after conversion. No errors have popped up throughout our testing and pdfMechanic did not freeze or crash.

On the other hand, there is no help file available and you cannot convert more than one PDF at the same time. Plus, the "Settings" area does not let you set the tool to open the output directory or to turn off the computer after conversion. Also, you cannot preview documents and the interface needs some improvements.