PDFZilla is a Windows desktop program for turning PDF files into editable documents, spreadsheets, web pages and images. It also works in the other direction, building PDFs from picture files, and includes small tools for merging, cutting and rotating existing PDFs. PDFZilla is shareware: users can download and use the trial with restrictions. Registering a license removes them.
Conversion from PDF
Every conversion in PDFZilla follows the same steps. The user first adds one or more PDF files to a list with the Add button. The user then picks the output format, adjusts its settings and starts the conversion. Users can change settings for the chosen format from an Output Format sub-menu without leaving the main window. They can also change the destination folder, which defaults to a location on the system drive.
The target formats fall into a few groups:
- Word and rich text: DOC files that keep the text and graphics of the original pages, and RTF files that open in WordPad or any word processor.
- Plain text: TXT output for copying the text alone, for example into Notepad.
- Excel: XLS and XLSX workbooks, which also give a way to pull the content of PDF forms into cells for editing.
- HTML: web pages, with an index file generated automatically so the converted pages can be browsed as a set.
- Images: each page saved as a JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF or BMP picture.
- Flash: SWF output with options for compression, frames per second and an optional play button.
During conversion to DOC or HTML, PDFZilla hides its progress display and uses all available processor capacity to finish faster.
Page ranges and multiple files
A conversion does not have to cover the whole document. PDFZilla can process only selected pages. This is useful when users need just a few pages as pictures or need to edit a single chapter in Word. For SWF output, users set the range as a start page and an end page.
Users can place several PDFs in the list at once, and PDFZilla converts them as a batch without further input. PDFZilla supports text in PDFs written in many languages, including German, French, Spanish and Italian. It also supports Unicode-encoded PDF files. The program also accepts restricted PDFs.
Images to PDF
The reverse conversion takes picture files and saves them as PDF documents. PDFZilla accepts JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, Photoshop PSD, ICO, PPM and TGA images. The process uses the same pattern as the other converters: add the images, then run the conversion.
Merging, cutting and rotating PDFs
Three separate tools handle page-level work on PDFs that do not need format conversion:
- PDF Merger combines several PDF files into one document. Users add files to the merger, which joins them in a single operation.
- PDF Cutter opens a PDF so users can delete unwanted pages, then saves the shortened file.
- Rotation turns the pages of added PDFs by 90 or 180 degrees after the user selects the orientation.
These tools cover basic page organization only. PDFZilla is not a PDF editor for changing text or annotations inside a document. Users make text edits after converting the file to Word or another editable format.
Trial and registered versions
The PDFZilla trial limits how much work users can do: it allows a small number of file conversions and converts only part of each document. A registered license removes these limitations and includes email technical support. Licenses are available for single users and in volume tiers for several computers.
