PDF Summary Maker for Windows

Adobe's Portable Document Format helped transform the business world and bring it onto the Internet and into the paperless age. Today many people use PDF files for everything ranging from important personal papers to service manuals for lawn mowers. If you use PDFs a lot, you'll like PDF Summary Maker from Traction Software. It's a PDF file management tool that lets you change the summary information in one or many PDF files all at once. You can change the creator, creation date, producer, author, title, and keyword fields within your documents. It includes full database import and export, too.

The program downloads as a zip file but installs conventionally. It opens with a nag screen describing the version's limitations. The main interface is a simple spreadsheet-like dialog box. PDF Summary Maker will search your system for all PDFs, generate reports, and perform batch conversions, among other functions. New to version 1.09 is a feature that populates keyword selections from the first page in a set of documents, which is usually the introduction.

PDF Summary Maker is free to try but comes with a three-file limit, after which it's $79.95 to buy. If you use PDFs a lot, though, it could pay for itself the first time you have to go in and change an unfortunate error item by item. Traction is a member of the Adobe Solutions Network, so you know their software will mesh well with all versions of Acrobat. However, it doesn't work with Reader or Acrobat Reader.