A-PDF Preview and Rename 3.2

The program's name summarizes exactly what it does – it allows you to have a quick preview of your PDF files, and rename them manually or in batches. This tool is capable of using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to "read" a selected portion of the document, and of renaming it based on that information. It can also help you use any field in the metadata information of a PDF document as the new name.

The program's user interface is quite clear and comfortable. However, the OCR-related options may be hard to understand and to get used to at first. It is basically composed of two panels – on the left panel you can add and select the source PDF files you want to rename, and on the right panel you can preview the selected PDF file and rename it. When you select a document, the program shows thumbnails of all its pages, so that you can browse them and choose the most appropriate new name for the document. You can type this name manually, but, as stated before, the OCR functionality allows you to select a portion of any page in your document and take the new name from it.

As for the metadata information, you can select any piece of it and set it as the new PDF file name with just one click. You are allowed to choose among the document's title, author, subject or keywords. But the most powerful feature of this tool is probably its ability to rename many PDF files in batches, using the OCR technique. You can select in any of the documents the portion of the text you want to use for the new file name and then press the "Batch OCR" button – the program will read and rename all the files on your list automatically. Anyway, this method is useful only if all the PDF documents on your list have a readable piece of information in the selected position, since otherwise you might get undesirable results.

To sum up, A-PDF Preview and Rename is a powerful tool that allows you to have a very quick preview of your PDF documents and rename them either manually – based on what you see – or automatically, as long as the design and structure of all documents match.