14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to working with PDFs the market is very far from being short of tools and utilities. pdfMechanic is a new alternative if you’re looking for an easy to use instrument that can extract pages from PDF texts, merge or convert them to a different format.
The version number (0.2) shows that the application is quite fresh on the market. it is not doing the work all by itself and actually depends on other utilities for getting the job done (PyQt4, pyPDF and PDFMiner). This aspect is less interesting as long as the job gets done with no difficulty and in a comfortable fashion.
You don’t have to install pdfMechanic on your system because the program is portable. Simply unzip and double-click pdfMechanic.exe to launch. A very simple interface will pop up. The three tabs available in the window stand for the three functions the app has been designed to fulfill: merging, extracting and converting PDFs.
There are no menus at your disposal or a general configuration area. All the options are condensed in these three tabs and nothing more.
Merging PDF files is not limited to two items. You can combine as many documents as you want. The order of the pages is given by the order of the entries in the list. That is why you have the possibility to move them up and down and organize them as it best suits you.
Loading up the documents is not a tough task, but not as easy as I expected, either, because there is no support for drag and drop. Also, you cannot add more than one item at a time.
As soon as all the data is loaded and in the right order you can hit “Merge” button and the app should glue them up in an instant. However, during our testing we noticed that attempting to combine multiple PDFs with plenty of pages will cause pdfMechanic to fail in completing the job. RAM usage would keep increasing and CPU stabilizes at ~50% with no end at all. On the other hand, if you pick lighter items the app will merge them with no problems.
At the end of the operation you are not alerted in any visible way that all files have been combined into a single document. There is no progress bar to inform you of the status of the job. The only hint you get is a “Done” message displayed for a brief period of time in the lower part of the application window.
Extracting the pages from a document is an easy task. The options in this screen are straightforward and require no explanation. Load the PDF, choose the destination of the output and define the pages you want extracted.
pdfMechanic can extract a single page, random pages or you can define a range of pages. Regardless of the option you choose the job is as easy as can be and our tests showed that the program can carry it out successfully.
Converting a PDF into a different format is not an option-rich task, but there are several choices you can make. There are two conversion methods you can pick from; one lets you select the entire document while the other offers the chance to define specific pages.
Either way you still have only two choices when it comes to the output format: TXT or HTML. A larger range of file types for the end result would bring nothing but benefits to pdfMechanic, but for the time being these two are enough.
As far as the results of the conversion process goes, everything was in order and the documents could be read easily.
pdfMechanic is a simple tool designed for simple purposes. We encountered difficulties only when merging larger PDF files as the app would gulp up more and more RAM without putting it to good use. CPU usage was also noticeable during this operation.
When processing the data the program tends to exaggerate a bit with system resources, but as it does not accomplish tasks that require a lot of time to complete there should be no problem.
The options under “Extract” module are variate as they let you take out a single page, random pages or a range of pages. You have only two output formats for converting the PDFs: TAX and HTML. A wider range would also include several image formats as well. There is no progress bar to track the current state of any of the jobs supported by the program. It still lacks some stability as far as manipulating larger PDFs are concerned and a wider range of output formats would definitely improve it, but overall it does a good job. It can be used successfully to merge several lighter PDF files into a single document (we were successful gluing up 6 items in one session) and you can rely on it to extract, split or convert PDFs in an easy, comfortable way.
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