PDF Editors

The PDF or portable document file format came into being in the 1990s, and ever since then has established the standard for sharing readable documents. Whether it is an official document or a storybook for your personal reading, if it is on the digital, you most likely would have received the material in the PDF format. The simplicity and shareability, along with multiplatform support, makes them the primary choice of document for computer and mobile users. Free PDF readers are available if you want to just read the document without the need to perform any modification in its texts or images. But beyond simple viewing, if you're going to edit your PDF document, you'd need a robust PDF editor to make changes as you like. It can be a simple merge or extraction of pages or more advanced edits such as altering the font styles and sizes, replacing an image, etc.

What does a PDF Editor do?

As the name suggests, a PDF editor lets you edit and modify a PDF document. You can insert new pages, modify existing ones, rotate them, delete some pages, or extract them to a new document. You can also merge two PDFs to make one document or split them up to have two separate files as per your needs. You can add comments, watermarks, footnotes, and even password protect your document. More advanced editors will let you perform edits in the content of the document, such as adding or removing texts, editing their fonts, adding boxes, images, etc. Some even allow you to embed video in your PDFs.

The need for a PDF Editor

With the increasing popularity of PDFs across all industries and for personal use, a PDF editor has become an indispensable tool. Whether it is a scan of an official document or a web document, it is easier to retain down the years if it is in the PDF format. Most jobs and exams also need you to submit PDF documents. Imagine having some 100 or 1000 pages of a PDF document that needs to be edited at places. Would you now try to convert the whole document into a word file and edit it? Chances are you won't possibly find an application that can perform a conversion for such a big file size. But having all the PDF editing tools at your fingertips will help you achieve major or minor changes on the go without the hassle of having to perform any Word to PDF document conversions or vice versa.

Promoting a paperless office with scanning and OCR capabilities

In a paperless office, since you'd want to digitize all your documents, a PDF editor can help you achieve that if it can connect to your scanner. It has been brought about by the OCR or Optical Character Recognition capability in some PDF editors. With this, you can convert your paper document images in editable PDF files and edit them, just like you'd write and edit any other text in a Word Processor.

Free PDF editors for individuals for basic editing

While Adobe Acrobat, the creator of the PDF format, still remains the industry leader in its offering for a PDF editor, its price may be on the higher side, especially for individual users who aren't part of any organization. But to make things easier, various free PDF editors are available, including some online editors, which will save your day if you need to perform some basic modifications to your PDF document. For remote freelancers, these can prove to be immensely useful. Some of the free options available are Smallpdf, PDFsam Basic, PDFescape, Sejda, and others. 

Finding the best PDF editor for your organization

For starters, look for a PDF editor that has an intuitive interface and doesn't have too many sophisticated features for a first time user. Keep in mind the employees who'd be using it, whether they are from a technical or a non-technical background. You'd possibly be dealing with sensitive information in the PDFs. So choose an editor that lets you password-protect files or at least one that doesn't allow any edits without permission. With BYOD culture gaining popularity, it might be a great option to invest in an editor that will enable modifications even while on a tablet or mobile phone. Check for reviews in online forums, determine the number of people in the team who'd be using the editing software, gauge your requirements, and check what functionalities you can't function without in your organization. In case of ultimate advanced editing at the professional level, you may still want to turn to Adobe as it owns several technologies that aren't made available to other software manufacturers.