PDF Shaper 14.0 updates UI and built-in PDF viewer, adds new paid-for features

Burnaware has released PDF Shaper 14.0, a major new release of its freemium PDF toolkit for Windows PCs. In addition to changing the Professional edition title to Ultimate edition, PDF Shaper 14.0 adds a couple of new features to its paid-for tiers.  

The big change in PDF Shaper Free 14.0 -- replicated across the suite -- is the updated user interface and translations. There’s also new preview mode added to the built-in PDF viewer.

PDF Shaper is described as a "full-featured desktop PDF package for your digital documents and files". It contains a wide range of PDF-related tools, with core functionality found in the cut-down Free edition. Free users can merge or split PDF documents, plus insert, move, delete, rotate and crop existing pages. They can also extract images, text and entire pages from PDF documents, plus remove images, annotations and bookmarks.

The free version also ships with tools for previewing PDFs and viewing PDF/XMP information.

The paid-for editions add additional features with options for converting between formats, signing documents and setting password protection. Ultimate users also gain OCR tools for extracting text from image-only PDF files, plus a standalone PDF Viewer for viewing and printing PDF documents. Both also offer 64-bit versions for better performance.

Both PDF Shaper Professional and PDF Shaper Ultimate gain new features with the release of version 14.0. There’s a new TXT to PDF converter for both tiers, which is accompanied by the promise of improved PDF and DOC/DOCX conversion.

The Ultimate Edition -- renamed from Professional -- also gains significant changes to its external PDF Viewer. Improvements include the ability to search text, rotate and scroll pages, save or delete attached files, and asynchronous page loading. The viewer is also able to handle 4GB+ PDF files for the first time.

The update is rounded off with the usual slew of bug fixes -- one of which resolves an issue with overwriting and renaming duplicate files. A bug affecting the conversion of Unicode DOC/DOCX files has also been resolved.

Users can download the feature-limited PDF Shaper Free 14.0 for PCs running Windows 7 or later. Seven-day trials of PDF Shaper Premium and PDF Shaper Ultimate are also available, with full versions costing $29.95 and $49.95, respectively.