ByteScout PDF MultiTool is an unusually powerful tool for working with PDFs.

The program opens as a simple viewer. Open a PDF and you can page through it, zoom in or out, rotate pages, search for text and more.

A left-hand pane organises PDF MultiTool's more interesting functions into a tree, with three main sections.

"Data Extraction" has tools to extract text, embedded images, attachments and XFA form data from the selected area, the current page or the entire document. That would be useful at any level, but PDF MultiTool offers real depth. It can extract text from image files (via OCR) as well as regular documents, optionally trim spaces, align text columns to any header, or unwrap lines, before exporting the results as TXT, CSV, XML, XLS or XFDF, and saving the results as a file or copying them to the clipboard.

It's a similar story in the "Conversion" section, where PDF MultiTool converts documents to images or HTML. As well as supporting some less common formats (GIF, multipage TIFF, EMF as well as JPG, BMP, PNG etc), it gives detailed control over compression methods, DPI, even CSS usage (there's an option to convert HTML controls to plain text).

The "Utilities" section is more familiar, with tools to display document metadata, rotate, split or merge files. But even here there are a few extras, including the ability to make a PDF document searchable via OCR. This didn't work well for us, but results will vary according to your source material, and it's good to have the option available.

Version 6.20.2354 brings:
 

• More PDF specific functions and PDF reading speed improvements
• CSV and XML extractors improved support for tables with empty columns inside
• new functions: Extract Video and Extract Audio
• File annotations rendering improved
• fixed null exception when trying to dispose already disposed pages
• Annotations scaling and coordinates improved
• XLSExtractor: improves fonts support
• Rendering: Added command line vbscript example
• Rendering improves annotations rendering
• text output rendering improved
• XFDF Extractor: added support for checkboxes
• PDF2HTML improves form controls output
• Images output improved to support more sub-formats
• Unicode text handling improved
• TIFF splitting improved