Foxonic Professional for Windows

The first time we tried to use Foxonic Professional, we didn't understand it. But we hadn't slept well the night before, so we decided to set it aside and come back to it when we were feeling a little more focused. Our second attempt at understanding Foxonic Professional was more successful, but the fact remains that some aspects of the program just don't make any sense.

The program's interface is plain and not particularly intuitive. For the most part it just consists of a file viewer that allows users to navigate to and select the files they want to work with. Beneath this is an area where users can drag and drop files, and our first instinct was to drag the files that we wanted to use to this area and then select the desired tool. But this is not, in fact, how the program works, and we never did figure out what--if anything--this drag-and-drop area is for. There's no mention of it at all in the built-in Help file. It turns out that users simply select the files that they want to use and go from there. Most of the program's features worked as expected on PDF files; the Merger, Splitter, Page Remover, and Page Extractor were fine. However, if users are looking to turn a file or files into a PDF, they should know that Foxonic only does this with images, and even then, not very well. For the life of us, we could not get the program to combine two images into one PDF, even though we followed the directions the best we could. The program's Help file is sad; it provides a description of each feature and aspect of the interface, but no instructions for actually using these features to produce the desired result. Overall, Foxonic Professional is functional, but we feel that there are other PDF tools out there that are much easier to use.

Foxonic Professional installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program with reservations.

Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of Foxonic Professional 4.2 build 0095. The trial version is limited to 30 days.

Version 5.0 build 0183 supports "Batch Processing Mode" in "PDF Splitter", "PDF Page Extractor" and "PDF Page Remover".