PDF Shaper 8.2 improves text detection and extraction, supports system fonts and more

Burnaware Technologies has released PDF Shaper Free 8.2, a major update to its freeware PDF toolkit for Windows users. PDF Shaper provides a series of tools for managing and optimizing PDF files, and is also available in Premium and Professional editions.

It’s the paid-for editions that get the most love in this new release, with the non-free Watermark tool gaining three new features. All versions gain support for system TrueType fonts, codepages and styles as well as an option to select specific pages when converting a PDF to an image file.

PDF Shaper Free offers 17 individual tools, split into four categories: Documents, Content, Pages and Security.

Documents provides a series of conversion tools to and from PDF, with options including processing only a selection of pages and choosing an image format and DPI for output. The Content tab allows users to split or merge multiple PDFs, plus extract images and text, as well as strip images.

Users can also extract and delete pages as well as crop and rotate them, while the final tab -- Security -- provides a range of tools including the ability to add, update or strip metadata from PDFs.

Premium and Pro users gain the Watermarks tool, plus tools for creating PDFs from Word documents as well as protecting PDF documents from being extracted. The Pro version also adds an external PDF viewer with print capabilities as well as OCR support.

The app is easy to use: select a tool and then a new window opens. Choose the file (or files) to process, tweak settings via the Options tab and click Process. Handy extras include being able to preview PDFs after selection and change the running order of files being processed.

Version 8.2’s three new watermarking options allow users to numerate pages in a PDF document, add multi-line text watermarks and mix image, text and page numbers on the same page.

A number of bugs have been fixed -- including one that rotated the first page even if it was skipped. There’s also the promise of improved text detection and extraction.

PDF Shaper Free 8.2 is available now as a freeware download for PCs running Windows XP or later. PDF Shaper Premium costs $19.95, while PDF Shaper Pro costs $29.95. 10-day trial versions are available for both.