BEST FREE PDF TOOLS
By: Jojo Yee
Introduction
A PDF tool comes in handy when you need to deal with PDF files such as to merge or split pages, add a header, footer or watermark, highlight or annotate PDF documents, or convert from other files to PDFs or vice versa. In this review, multipurpose programs offering general features for merging PDF files, splitting or re-ordering pages, etc within a single application are discussed under General Tools. Those designed for a more specific task are grouped under Specific Tools.
General Tools - Merge, Split, Reorder & More
PDFill PDF Tools is my favorite with its nice, clean user interface covering most functions, including merge pdf files, split or reorder pages, rotate or crop pdf pages, add headers and footers complete with page numbers, etc.
Watermarks can be added either by typing in some text (such as ‘DRAFT’ for documents to be reviewed), or by inserting a background image in PDF format.
Some additional features are supported, such as encrypt and decrypt with security options; reformat multiple pages into one page; delete, flatten or list PDF form fields; convert PDF to images or vice versa; and convert a PostScript file to PDF.
Note that PDFill PDF Tools comes bundled with PDFill PDF Editor, which is not free. However, you can run PDFill PDF Tools separately after installation. The free software part of the package does not support functions such as converting PDF to text, making annotations, etc. But those features are all available in the Specific Tools listed in the next section.
PDFTK Builder is a useful alternative. The big advantage of PDFTK Builder is that it can merge or reorder selected pages of PDF files at one go, which is much simpler if you have a lot to do.
PDFTK Builder also supports split, rotate, background/stamp and encrypt features. Besides these, it has no other additional features.
It's worth noting that PDFTK Builder lacks a basic function (available in PDFill PDF Tools) for watermarking PDF documents with background text—this can be important if you need to mark your documents as 'Confidential', 'Draft', etc.
If your priority is to get the maximum number of features from a single freeware package, then jPDF Tweak will be a good choice. However, its user interface is not as straightforward as in either of the two applications reviewed above. Its merge, split and reorder functions are available under the ‘input’ tab, and a new filename has to be entered in the ‘output’ tab.
This feature rich program allows you to rotate, watermark and format multiple pages. You can change page numbers and chapter bookmarks. And jPDF Tweak also offers encryption functions and lets you add attachments to PDF documents.
Additionally, jPDF Tweak enables you to set viewer preferences and document properties, including title, author, subject and keywords.
PDFsam (PDF Split and Merge) is well worth trying if you need to visually re-order or recompose multiple pages of PDF files.
You can mix, merge or extract, split and rotate pages by specifying the page numbers. However, PDFsam also lets you re-organize PDF pages in a thumbnail view. In this mode, you can easily work with thumbnails to merge, delete, rotate or re-order PDF pages and save the results as another PDF file.
Since PDFsam is a Java application, it will run on any operating system that supports Java. The basic version of PDFsam is free for use. The installer is bundled with an advertising program OpenCandy but you can get from here a standalone zip file with no such bundle.
For Linux users, PDF Shuffler should make it much easier for you to re-arrange pages in a pdf document, or merge and split pdf files.
After importing one or more pdf files to PDF Shuffler, the various pages appear as thumbnails, making it easy to merge, re-order or delete. You can right-click a thumbnail to rotate or crop a page before exporting to a new pdf file.
PDFShuffler is a small application running on Linux. Some distros, such as Ubuntu, include PDF Shuffler in the repository for ease of download and setup.
Specific Tools
The free applications reviewed in this section are helpful for their specific functions mostly not covered by theGeneral Tools.
Oracle PDF Import Extension (formerly Sun PDF Import Extension) allows you create a hybrid pdf file with LibreOffice or OpenOffice Writer. A hybrid pdf file is basically a pdf file containing an embedded odf source file. The beauty of this type of file is that not only can it be viewed with a normal PDF viewer, it can also be opened for full text editing with LibreOffice or OpenOffice Writer in 100% layout accuracy. See this article A PDF File Allows Editing in 100% Layout Accuracy for details.
If you need to edit a normal or non-hybrid pdf file, LibreOffice or OpenOffice Draw is one of the free options available. You can use it to edit small portions of text, add or remove images and so on with no layout adjustments.
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