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Your guide to the best PDF editors of 2017. Check out our latest reviews and buyer's guide to the top PDF editors of this year.

We test and rate the best PDF editors you can get, including packages from Adobe, Foxit, Nuance, Nitro and more. Most of the packages here cost money but it is possible toedit PDFs for free.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most popular types of document for sharing as most devices and computers can open a PDF for the recipient to read. It doesn't matter whether you're using a laptop or a smartphone, nor which software was used to create it.

But while some PDF reader software allows you to annotate or add comments, such as the free Foxit Reader, sometimes you need to edit the actual PDF itself. This is possible with the tools below, even if a different program was used to make the file in the first place. Such programs allow to to do things like convert a PDF to Wordformat.

All software below lets you create PDFs from other files - including .doc - but they also allow you to edit PDF files so that you don't need to track down the original source file in its native format. In addition, most of them also provide advanced features such as form creation, digital signature and ID certification, and collaborative review and commenting, that you generally dont get with free PDF packages. We also take a look at one free package - AbleWord PDF editor - to see just how much you can get without spending a penny.

If you don't want to install any software, you can edit up to three PDFs online using PDF Pro for free, and there's also FormSwift PDF editor online.

Overall, we found Nuance Power PDF 2 to be intuitive and easy to use, especially if you're familiar with Microsoft Office. We have little doubt that most users will be able to quickly get up and running with it. We found the reviewing features particularly comprehensive, proving means of annotating, marking text in various ways and drawing attention to parts of a document, and it's great that there's now support for touchscreens. Given that it's so much cheaper than Acrobat, it makes a lot of sense for small business use.

Read our full Power PDF 2 review.

This is a fully featured PDF editor that's very easy to use and represents good value for money.Like other editors, itprovides facilities for PDF creation and editing, form creation, digital signatures and commenting, plus integrated optical character recognition (OCR) so that scanned paper documents can be turned into truly editable PDFs.

Version 11 adds various improvements including more performance enhancements compared toversion 10. it also adopts an Office 2016-style interface and it's possible to customise the Home tab at the top so it contains your most used options and tools. For those new to Nitro, there's a new Product Tour which walks you through the main features.

We like the integration with Box, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox which makes it very easy to open and save files directly to those cloud storage services.

When it comes to editing PDFs, Nitro makes it a breeze to change text, rearrange images, add forms and more. You can change the order of pages in a document simply by dragging and dropping. And it's also easy to sign a PDF using the QuickSign shortcut.

At133.99 for the Personal version it's not the cheapest, but you do get a lot of features.

Wondershare's PDFelement takes a lot of inspiration (as do other PDF editors) from Microsoft Office, so if you're used to Office 2007 or later, you'll instantly feel at home with PDFelement.

The interface is clean and intuitive and the tools are easy to use and do what you'd expect. You can create a PDF from scratch, but can also import a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.

We found this worked well, except for large Excel sheets since there's no option to select just a portion of the sheet you want to import: it's all or nothing.

On unprotected documents you can click the 'Edit text'button and do exactly that. Unlike some PDF editors, which force you to 'Tippex' over text and then type over the top, PDFelement allows you to select and modify text just as you can in Word. Plus, you can select and move images around at will, delete elements and import new images.

As you'd expect from a paid-for product, it allows you to protect documents, create forms and sign documents.

It costs $69.99, which works out at exactly the same in Great British Pounds once VAT is added on. And at that price, it's good value.If you need OCR - the ability to convert scanned text documents into editable text - that version costs an extra20.

Foxit PhantomPDF Business 7 provides the level of functionality that the professional user has come to expect at a keen price. The user interface is modern and easy to use (mainly because it borrows heavily from Microsoft Office) and Foxit provides no shortage of tutorial videos and easy access to support options to get you up to speed in record time.

Plus, if you only need very basic editing options such as annotation, highlighting and signing PDFs, then Foxit Reader is totally free.

Read our full Foxit PhantomPDF review

Adobe invented the PDF, and so you'd be right to expect that it has the best - or at least very good - PDF editing software. These days, of course, Adobe wants you to pay a subscription to access the latest version of Acrobat Pro. The DC stands for Document Cloud, and hints at the fact that you can store your PDFs in the cloud and collaborate on them with others.

If you don't need many editing features, you can just use Acrobat DC, which is the standard version. However, while this works out at 11.42 per month ($15), the Pro version ishardly any more expensive at 13.33 per month.You can find out more at Adobe's website

However,unless you really need its features (or you can get it for education prices) then it's hard to justify the expense when other PDF editors do a lot of what Acrobat can do for a considerably smaller outlay.

Although primarily a word processor, the fact that the free AbleWord can read and write PDF files means that its more than capable of acting as a PDF editor, thereby suggesting comparison with some seriously expensive competition. While the professional aspects of professional PDF editors are missing, for simply editing PDF documents, AbleWord is perfectly capable.

Here's our full AbleWord review.

Costing significantly less than virtually all other business-oriented PDF editors, yet providing the functionality youd expect, Tracker PDF XChange Pro is well worth trying out (there's a trial option on the website). The down-side is that some of the functions youd expect to find in the main package are in separate utilities but this is only a minor inconvenience, given the price.

Read our full PDF XChange Pro review

Able2Extract Pro 11 may have an odd name, but this is a fully fledged PDF creator and editor.

It can also take a PDF and convert it to various formats including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. When converting to Excel, you can select only the content you want to extract (the name is relevant here) and see a preview of what it will look like before actually exporting it.

Editing functions include being able to highlight and replace text (fonts cannot always be matched of course), remove pages and annotate and redact text. And as with other paid-for packages, you can protect a PDF with a password and differing file permissions.

At $149.99 (approx 143 inc VAT), this is one of the more expensive options, so if you don't need all its features, you can save money and opt for one of the cheaper packages here.

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The best PDF editors for 2017 - PC Advisor