If all you want to do is read PDF files on your desktop, your existing copy of Adobe Reader is just perfect for the job. The software lets you view and print PDFs but you’ll have to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat in case you would like to have the ability to create PDF files offline.

There are some excellent PDF Printer Drivers (like doPDF) that don’t cost anything and can create PDF files but they only do half the job - you’ll still need a separate program, like Adobe Reader, for viewing those PDF files locally.

Nitro Reader gives you the best of both worlds. It’s a PDF Reader for Windows that you may also use for creating PDFs from Office documents, web pages and virtually any other Windows application that has the print button.

If you would to convert a batch of files into PDFs, simply drag them all to the Nitro Reader icon on your desktop and they’ll be converted into PDFs almost instantly. It can’t get any easier than this.

Other than PDF generation, Nitro Reader offers some other useful features as well. For instance, you can import an image of your signature into Nitro and turn it into a stamp. The next time you want to sign a PDF file, simply add that stamp using Nitro Reader itself.

The software has a useful “Extract Images” feature that you may use to extract and export all images from a PDF into individual files. This is handy if you want to re-use any of the images from that PDF but don’t have access to the document from which that PDF file was originally created.

Nitro PDF Reader is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 (x86 and x64 editions).

Related: A guide to online PDF tools