PDF, or Portable Document Format, files, are an excellent way to distribute documents by email or on the web as they preserve your fonts, formatting and pictures in a way that, say, Word documents don’t. But the £300 price of the Adobe Acrobat PDF maker puts it out of reach for home users. Expert PDF 6 is a cheaper alternative.

The new version allows creation of interactive PDF forms for tasks such as opening websites or submitting personal data. The inclusion of web links has been improved, it includes support for the professional indexing system used by lawyers, doctors and some businesses and enhanced document encryption offers peace of mind that important files can be distributed securely and read only by those authorised to do so.

Aside from these tweaks and additions the software remains much the same. Expert PDF installs a printer that allows any document or image in Windows to be ‘printed’ as a PDF. A dedicated Creator application acts as a print server and allows users to create watermarks, add encryption, preview files, save files or email them directly. PDFs can also be converted to Rich Text Format for editing in Word or other software and a batch converter makes it easy to queue up multiple documents.

The PDF Editor is the most powerful tool in the collection, though, and aside from the aforementioned form-filling it offers text and image selection, text editing and image and shape insertion. Highlight, underline, strikeout and stamp tools make it easy to draw attention to specific areas of a document and you can also link specific text to other pages or passages for quick-browsing. In addition to the dedicated tools, Expert PDF 6 integrates with Microsoft Office for instant conversion and automatic inclusion of web links on PDFs.

We were generally very pleased by how easy Expert PDF 6 was to use and in its ability to create professional results with web links and document navigation tools. While some features didn't work quite as well as we'd hoped, there's no denying that as a cheaper version of the official Acrobat software, this is an extremely capable program.