The free applications reviewed in this section are helpful for their specific functions mostly not covered by the General Tools.
Sun PDF Import Extension to OpenOffice.org allows PDF documents imported in Draw to preserve layout and edit small portion of text. This extension works further to allow you to import and modify PDF documents in OpenOffice from a PDF/ODF hybrid file with 100% layout accuracy. The hybrid pdf file is a pdf file containing an embedded odf source file. It can be viewed with a normal pdf viewer and can be opened with OpenOffice for full editing. See A PDF File Allows Editing in 100% Layout Accuracy for details.
 Some PDF to TXT Converter is a light tool which preserves text and layout, supports for drag and drop, batch conversion, and encrypted pdf files. Alternatively, try the latest version of Nitro PDF Reader which gives you an option to either keep text in paragraphs so it's easier for re-alignment, or break each line to a width of certain number of characters at your choice.
FreeOCR.net is a scan and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program and good for extracting text from scanned PDF documents. Moreover, images from scanned PDF documents can be selected and placed on the clipboard. Try also Free-OCR.com for an online OCR solution.
 Some PDF to Word Converter allows removing line breaks and preserves paragraphs with soft returns. It supports batch conversion and encrypted pdf files, keeps images but does not preserve hyperlinks for the version under review.
 7-PDF Maker is a powerful tool to convert a wide range of formats to PDF. It is not only able to convert files generated by Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Maths and AutoCad, but also convert images, text or web based files to PDF. The setup comes with a Command line version or a Windows Explorer integration and the program supports user interface both in English and German even though the website is currently only available in German.
If you are using office applications such as OpenOffice and Jarte, they come with a feature to export files to PDF. Microsoft Office 2007 also allows a free add-in for saving documents as PDF.
Using either 7-PDF Maker or the above office applications, clickable hyperlinks or bookmarks together with page layouts are nicely preserved in the converted or exported PDF files.
Alternatively you may install a virtual PDF printer, such as Bullzip, to create a PDF file by printing text or other contents via the PDF printer. However by doing so, clickable hyperlinks and bookmarks are usually not preserved in the resulting PDF file.
 If you are only converting various image files to PDF, my favorite goes to i2pdf. It works even better than the tool "Convert Images to PDF" included in PDFill PDF Tools. Download and unzip i2pdf, run the executable directly and no installation is required. This program is portable and user friendly -- just drag and drop the images on the program window, click "Build PDF" button and it's done. In setting the page output, "paperless" format is helpful for converting portrait and landscape images to the PDF file and view it on the screen without blank paper margins.
Some PDF Images Extract is a good choice. You can extract all images from several PDF files by batch or pull images from selected pages in a PDF file. Images can be saved in jpg, bmp, png, tiff, gif or tga formats.
 PDF-XChange Viewer supports annotating PDF documents and allows for highlighting, crossing or underlining text; drawing shapes; stamping and filling up PDF forms with a built-in typewriter. It is surprisingly more than a viewer!
For Linux users, Okular is a good choice. It allows for annotations, highlighting, drawing lines and shapes, adding textboxes and stamps, selecting and saving a part of documents as text or in an image format.
PDFescape is a helpful web application which lets you create a PDF form online. Right from your browser, you can fill up a PDF form or create a fillable PDF form easily. You can also add text, links and sticky notes, whiteout contents and draw basic shapes. Free account users are limited to a maximum file size of 2 MB or 50 pages per file.
Briss, a cross-platform Java application, makes cropping PDF pages visually, faster and much easier—just load a pdf file, draw one or more rectangles with a mouse to crop the regions you want from a page and save them in another file. If you load a PDF file with multiple pages, you are able to see the overlaid odd and even pages and crop them easily in one go.
BeCyPDFMetaEdit is a good find. It allows editing most metadata, customizing viewer preferences, slide show, page labels, etc. Tweak PDF is another choice with a simple user interface but without slideshow setting and some other features.
Try PDFCrak which runs on Linux or DOS (the version for DOS is available for download here). The only supported usage of this software is to recover passwords and/or content that you own but have lost access to as stated in the FAQ.
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7.0 
Unrestricted freeware 
Win 98 to Win 7 (32 and 64-bit)
This program is portable
Comments
Downloaded and installed PDFill PDF Tools primarily to convert images to PDF. As the description states, the complete not-free PDF Editor application is installed but with most of the options disabled.
Unfortunately, it installed its printer drivers even though it cannot print. In doing so, it disabled the PDF printer driver already installed which meant I was no longer able to print to a PDF file. I uninstalled PDFill.
Searched for and found a free JPG to PDF application oddly named JPGtoPDF by CompulsiveCode. It's a single-purpose standalone 224KB program that does the job handily.
I like the fact that the rendered PDF page has the same orientation as the JPG image, even if there are multiple images with mixed orientations. PDFill maintained the same orientation regardless of the image orientation. It may have an option to mix them, but I didn't keep the program around long enough to find out.
Now that that the free version of Foxit Reader includes a typewriter tool, I think it's worhy competition to PDF-Xchange. It has less tools, but enough to keep many users happy, and is very small and fast.
Another product I like is PDFCreator. It's open source, and apart from creating PDFs can be used for converting documents (including PDFs) to JPEG or other picture formats. It also has flexible pre-conversion and post-conversion options, which allow you to create macros in a Basic-like language to process the documents.
Hi!
If you want to crop a PDF : http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ (Plattform independent and fast)...
Thanks Muadib for mentioning Briss, which is a useful and effective program to crop PDF pages. Added now in the list.
PDF-Exchange Viewer also allows you to convert pdf to immage files like jpg, it even gives you conrol on the output quality. For me this freeware gets three thumbs up for ease of use and its versatillity.
W
PrimoPDF (primopdf.com) gives you more options than the other free apps. Security settings and image quality settings.
How do they handle files that need bleed and trim marks?
PrimoPDF is mentioned in Best Free PDF Writer.
PDFill PDF Tools comes with a virtual printer driver that "prints" to PDF and image formats!!
Sometimes (and more often than not for me) a free fast pdf viewer is all that's required. While maybe outside the scope of this article, I love
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads
PDF_Xchange Viewer for the purpose. It runs well for me under Win7 Pro x64.
chesscanoe
The i2pdf page does not currently link to the file. Can someone help me to get a copy of the program. Thank you.
Opera is not working right for me, but I found it downloaded fine with FireFox.
The download for the file is available at the bottom of i2pdf page. Please take a look again.
I couldn't get that link to connect either. Try this:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/i2pdf.shtml
I was able to get to the i2pdf page without any problem... and I even started the download by clicking on the download link. Its strange that its not working for you two :S
The download link at the i2pdf homepage works for me too.
Maybe it's a browser settings issue although I can't see where in mine. Tried with Opera on Ubuntu just now and get the same result - the D/L link just returns me to the main page.
Do you have session cookies disabled ?
I don't mean permanent cookies... only session cookies.
If yes try to enable them, if you haven't something against it. :)
Thanks for this. Highly simple solution which I hadn't thought of. I deplore cookies and block out everyone I can which explains why this wouldn't work!
I'm i2pdf author and that's why my guess was an easy one :)
I had to use session cookies to prevent some deep linking to the zip files, I'm asking people to at least visit the page before downloading a zip from my site.
Even that was not enough and I had to add some other thing to limit this.
Life it's hard.
Thanks for the explanation - much appreciated.
I hope you can help,
I am looking for a free PDF converter that will convert a doc or docx file into a pdf. The 2 issues that I have is that my original documents have hyperlinks, that must be maintained in the pdf file, and most important, the original doc files have images embedded in the text with wrap around text around the images.
The PDF converters that I have tried all seem to separate the images from the text or simply place the images without wrap around text.
7-PDF Maker mentioned in this article works for me to convert Word documents to PDF, keeping clickable hyperlinks and the page layout that includes the images wrapped around with text.
Hope that it works for you too.
Thanks,
That seems to do the trick perfectly
Just tried Nitro PDF. What a bust!
After installing, it wouldn't even open without crashing!
Uninstalled it.
Win XP, SP3.
Very useful PDF analyser;
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/PDFAnalyzer.shtml
Regards, Mike Connor
http://pdf-house.blogspot.com/ is a good repository for free PDF tools and libraries.
Hi, here is one new free tool called DigiSigner to digitally sign pdf files at http://digisigner.com.
You can start it also online, no need for installation. It shows you the document that you sign and you can place the signature where you want on the document.
It supports X.509 certificates, PFX key stores, windows key store, signature verification.
There are also desktop versions at http://www.digisigner.com/downloads.html available.
For those looking for an article on more PDF to Word tools, here's a relatively new article:
http://www.freewaregenius.com/2010/03/06/how-to-convert-pdf-to-word-doc-...
I tried to convert a 562KB pdf file on PDFOnline.com (rated 9/10 there) and it gave me a 4.26MB Word file with some formats changed.
Tried the same on PDFtoWord from Nitro and it gave me a 1.27 MB Word file with most formats retained. Looks good, though I need to receive a converted file via email.
DocumentBurster is a free tool which
takes as input PDF reports and bursts them based on meta-data. Splitted documents can be easily delivered to destinations like email and ftp.
Whether sending daily confirmations, monthly statements, or other critical reports or correspondence, DocumentBurster reduces costs and saves time by eliminating the labor-intensive process of hand-mailing or e-mailing each document separately.
Bursts them into what? Just separate pieces that need to be reassembled somehow? And why would I want to do this? It is very easy to email pdfs back and forth, and to upload for download (I do both all the time). Sorry if I'm being dense, but I don't understand what your software does or why it is useful.
I was looking for something to split PDF files by bookmarks. The solution I have found is free and works like a charm. It is listed above and it is called pdfsam (Split and Merge). It allowed me to split a 175 page document into 175 individual files, each named with the bookmark title (see the information in the pdfsam wiki at http://www.pdfsam.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=HowTo:ConsoleComplexPref...). I was just about to splurge 100 dollars on a commercial PDF product until I found this.
Great for sharing it with us.
I need a program to convert TIFF to PDF in batch mode (I have 16,000 files to convert). Some tools listed here let you select multiple TIFF files, but the result is a multi-page PDF, whereas I need a separate single-page PDF file corresponding to each TIFF file.
The only tool listed here that works in batch mode is the command-line add-on for 7-PDF Maker, but this program does not seem to allow you to define the page size (my images are 17x11 inches, but the 7-PDF program forces the PDF page to 8.5x11).
Does anyone know of a free tool to do this?
Hi Jim.
Did you try the irfanview + IMPDF (PDF plugin) combo ?
I'm not 100% sure but I believe it should be possible to use it to make conversions from the command line and convert a TIFF to a PDF that way.
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
Hi all, does anyone know of a PDF tool that will allow different headers and footers on selected pages of a PDF file? For example, header 1 on page 1, header 2 on pages 2-10, header 3 on pages 11-12 and so on. So far the PDF tools I have evaluated only allow one header for the entire document?
In addition, do are there any tools that allow a find and replace for text?
I have not yet tried the OpenOffice plug-in but will give it a try and will report back.
I cannot help with your first query. But, for your second query, please look at this link, you will find software suggestions, for find and replace.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-search-and-replace-utility.html
I recommend PDFCreator (Windows only) which installs itself as a "virtual" printer.
So in any print command that you use (from any Windows application), you can choose PDFCreator and it will render your printout into a PDF file. Quite cool. And it's an open-source application, which makes it even better...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
Amir K
Thanks for the comment. PDFCreator is included in Best Free PDF Writer.
Hi!
I loved the PDF-XChange Viewer soooo much, I purchased it for work and for home use! Then, I got my company use it. They all love it! It is one of the more useful tools for annotating and editing a PDF document. I used it for document reviews where there were more than 1 reviewer to comment on my technical document. If I had to choose just 1 PDF tool, and I have used every single one of them, this one would be it!!!
Another free Linux tool that can be used to edit PDF files is PDFEdit (there is a Cygwin version of this that can be used in Windows but I haven't tried it). It can edit just about anything in a PDF file, comes with a GUI, and is pretty easy to use for small text editing changes. For more complex changes though, it's not for the casual user or faint of heart. However, if you are a developer, you don't mind learning a little scripting, an API, or some PDF document internals it can be a powerful tool.
Excellent list. Is there any easy and fast app for PDF to PPT ?
Pdf Shuffler newer ver 0.5 is available
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfshuffler/
Thanks for the info.
The PDFSAM (PDF Split-and-Merge) description is inaccurate. It is in fact able to visually re-order pages from multiple PDFs. The interface is a little clunky but to my knowledge it is the only completely free program that can do this.
These days, I have been using its Merge function more. It is fast, accurate, and best of all, has a very pleasing *ping* sound upon successful completion.
PDF X-change Viewer PRO may also be able to visually reorder pages. I haven't sprung for a PRO license yet though.
Thanks for the heads-up. The description on pdfsam is now updated, but I'm yet to find out the basic version if it allows for reordering pages for multiple pdf documents unless they are merged into one before hand.
I agree with you that it's the only program, so far I've found, to run in Windows to visually re-order pages of a pdf, though I find that PDF Shuffler running in Linux works better in this respect.
PDF-XChange Viewer also works well in Linux, under Wine.
In Windows, it installs a plug-in for Firefox.
I am sorry, I think PDFCrack for DOS is untrusted for me because it is hosted in public hosting service. Who compiled the source code so I can trust the compiled version? I am a general Windows user but I care about the security problem. May be the compiled version can do anything malicious to my system and to my privacy.
PDFredirect- top of the line.
Moderators comment.
For your own safety please do not post email addresses.
If the same one appears again it, and the post, will be removed.
How about merging files online - http://www.pdfmerge.com for example? Or adding password protection to them, also online - http://www.pdfprotect.net .. There are many free and useful online PDF tools available these days, a new article that compares them specifically would be nice
i just discovered that you can install PDFill and afte you installed it, click on PDFill pdf tools (FREE) you can still delete pages by using "Split"
"Freeware pdf Unlocker" is a useful portable program which I think deserves a mention:
http://freeware-pdf-unlocker.en.softonic.com/
I see there are now also some online services to let you unlock pdf files:
http://www.pdfunlock.com/
http://www.ensode.net/pdf-crack.jsf
(As far as I know, unlocking pdfs is legal, and it can be very useful for a number of purposes... even if plagiary isn't your thing at all!)
The version of PDFill PDF Editor that is available for download as of today (December 14th, 2009) is version 7.0. It leaves a watermark on your edited PDF docs unless you pay. No longer worth it if you want free editing of PDF's.
Appreciated your feedback on the new version.
Yes, you are right that PDFill PDF Editor will leave watermarks in the saved files with the evaluation version. This program is not free as described in this article. But the subject covered here is PDFill PDF Tools which is free and has no watermark in the saved files. It can be run separately without starting the Editor.
Should you need other editing features not available to the PDFill PDF Tools, try other free alternatives in the section of Specific Tools, which I think could be helpful.
I can find no crop functions in jPDFtweak, though it does seem to be otherwise very useful. What I want is something along the lines of PDFCrop (http://www.noliturbare.com/pdf-tools/pdf-cropper), which automatically can crop the blank space surrounding an image. Such an image may not be centered, so the crop tools offered elsewhere are not precise enough and so far I have found none with a preview. As for PDFCrop, it worked beautifully (!!!), but only the first time I ran it. Now when I run it, nothing happens, though Task Manager shows it running. I've tried reboot and re-download. Mine is a Vista machine, 64 bit, of recent vintage.
Thanks for pointing out. BTW, PDF Shuffler has a crop function with good GUI. You might want to try it out if you happen to run a multi-boot system with Linux.
I recently visited coolpdf.com and saw that the softwares have turned commercial. TweakPdf, Pdf Watermark Creator, Pdf Bundle all have now prices against them.
There are some other softwares that can be added to the list like :
Guipdftk : http://www.paehl.de/pdf/gui_pdftk.html
PdfMerge : http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfmerge/
Pdf Split and Merge : http://www.pdfsam.org/
There are more choices available to convert Pdf to Word :
Pdf2Word : www.hellopdf.com
Also from :
http://www.free-pdf-to-word.com/
For basic annotating (e.g., highlighting, underlining, adding comments), try Foxit Reader 3.1. The annotated PDF may be saved, and the annotations are viewable in Adobe Reader. Foxit Reader also allows users to complete and save fillable PDF files. It's an excellent replacement for Adobe Reader.
Here is the link: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
Some 'basic' annotations such as adding text are not supported in Foxit Reader free edition though, while PDF-XChange Viewer supports for more.
Thanks for the many choices. Some of them had been tried out before but not as good. Will try the others though.
Welcome :). The list of softwares put up on this article is awesome. I came across a blog, which mentions this article on top of list for Pdf Tools. Here is the link to the blog article :
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/pdf-software-more.html
Look for link to our article under the heading "More reading & additional tools".
This blog also has Gizmo's Freeware amongst the most useful sites on the net, according to the author.
Here's a nice reference for all kinds of PDF manipulation.
Also, here two useful references I found to help with decrypting PDFs:
http://lifehacker.com/396534/freeware-pdf-unlocker-enables-copypaste-fun...
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/01/07/recover-pdf-password-with-pdfcr...
i also found a useful but free pdf tool.
simpo PDF to Text is free .
http://www.simpopdf.com/pdf-to-text.html
Thanks for mentioning PDFCrack. I've tried it on my PDF file encrypted with a password. It takes about 2 minutes or so to recover the password in length of 5 aphabets.
Added in the article as a useful tool meant for users who lost their passwords to open PDF files.
Adobe Reader 9 for function pdf to txt.When make click on Save like.
I tried Graphics2pdf took two jpgs, total of 416K and created a PDF of 11mb. i2pdf took the same two images and made a pdf of 600K. Easy choice.
Question:How to put video in pdf for free?Comercial is with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.But i want with free soft.
Embedding video in a pdf document will usually require a pdf editor. Sadly I don't see any pdf editor with more complete features is freeware so far.
Great to know if there's one.
Here are a lot of free tools for pdf: http://www.freesoft411.com/freeware/pdf-powerpoint-conversion.html
Good soft for pdf that i have on computer:
A-Pdf Number,A-Pdf text extractor,Atomic pdf password recovery,pdf text extractor Master,Tomahawk v.3,Cib pdf brewer,EBook to images,Free Pdf converter,Free pdf to word document converter,Office convert pdf to doc,pdf bundle,pdf creator,pdf bullzip,Pdf owner guard personal,rtf2txt20,text to pdf converter,Some pdf image extractor,Some pdf to html convertor,Some pdf to txt convertor,Some pdf to word convertor,Some text to pdf convertor,Primo pdf,Free pdf editor,Free pdf to word convertor,Pdfsam,Graphics2PDF,pdfmark,PDFTK Builder.Everything will find using Google browser.
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