PDF Shaper 15.6

PDF Shaper is an offline PDF processing toolkit for Windows. It works on individual documents or batches, combining tools for assembling PDFs, changing pages, extracting content and converting files. Its Free, Premium and Ultimate editions provide different sets of these functions.

Document assembly

PDF Shaper merges two or more PDF documents into one file, while its split tool divides a PDF according to a chosen number of files or pages.

Files enter the processing list through an Add control or by dragging them from File Manager. The selected tool then applies its options and saves the results to a chosen destination. Page extraction provides a more selective alternative to splitting, using individual page numbers, ranges or a mixture of both to identify the material to save.

Page changes

Pages can be moved to a specified position, rotated or deleted. Range selection lets an operation target part of a document rather than every page. For example, a selection such as 1,3-5 identifies the first page and pages three through five.

Cropping changes the area shown when a PDF is displayed or printed, including the removal of visible white margins. PDF Shaper does not cut away the underlying content outside that area.

Content extraction

The text extraction tool reads text from a digitally created PDF and displays it in a separate window. It needs text in the source document; an image of printed text does not serve as text input for this tool. Ultimate adds optical character recognition as a separate capability.

Image extraction saves images contained in a PDF to a destination folder. With an image-only PDF, the whole page is saved as an image. PDF Shaper’s separate page-to-image converter renders selected pages into BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF or TIFF files.

Format conversion

The converters in Premium and Ultimate create PDFs from TXT files, Word DOC or DOCX documents, and images. Image inputs include BMP, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WMF and EMF. Metadata can be supplied during conversion so the resulting PDF carries document information alongside its pages.

Conversion in the other direction produces text, Word DOC or image files. The DOC converter supports selected pages, allowing part of a PDF to become a word-processing document. It does not convert scanned or image-based PDFs to DOC, so the availability of OCR in Ultimate should not be treated as scanned-to-Word support in that converter.

PDF protection

PDF Shaper uses AES encryption and separates the password needed to open a document from the password governing permission changes. Permissions can restrict printing, editing and copying. When both passwords are set, either can open the file, but changing restricted features requires the permissions password. Password protection cannot be added to a document that is already signed or certified.

Digital signing uses a PKCS#12 identity containing a certificate and private key. The user supplies the certificate file and its password, and PDF Shaper saves the signed document to the selected destination. Encryption and signing are available in Premium and Ultimate.

Watermarks, metadata and element removal

Watermarks add text or an image to a document. Image watermarks accept GIF, PNG, JPEG and BMP files, while the text option takes the wording entered by the user.

Metadata editing changes or removes information such as the author, subject and keywords. The separate element-removal tool can remove items including bookmarks, annotations, form fields, images and metadata, with page selection available for targeted processing. Batch renaming handles the filenames of a PDF collection separately from the information stored inside each document.

PDF Shaper editions

The command line can process individual files, directories or saved file lists for supported operations, applying default or previously saved options.