PDF Help: Quick Tips for Editing and Merging Files

PDF Help: Best Free Tools and When to Use ThemPDFs are everywhere — contracts, manuals, invoices, reports, ebooks. They preserve layout across devices but can be frustrating when you need to edit, compress, extract pages, or sign a document. This guide walks through the best free tools for common PDF tasks, when to choose each, and practical tips so you can get the job done without paying for software.

Common PDF tasks and the right free tools

• View and read PDFs

  • Use Sumatra PDF (Windows) for a tiny, fast reader.
  • Preview (macOS) is built-in and handles most viewing, annotation, signing, and basic editing.
  • Firefox and Chrome have capable built-in PDF viewers — great for quick viewing without installing software.

• Convert PDF ↔ Word, Excel, or images

  • Smallpdf and ILovePDF (web) offer free conversion with daily limits; best for occasional use.
  • Google Drive can convert simple PDFs to Google Docs (then download as .docx); works well for text-based PDFs but may lose complex formatting.
  • LibreOffice Draw (desktop) can open and edit many PDFs and export to other formats; good if you prefer an offline, open-source option.

• Merge, split, and reorder pages

  • PDFsam Basic (desktop, open-source) is ideal for splitting and merging without uploading files.
  • Sejda (web and desktop) provides a friendly interface and useful page-level tools; free limits apply but it’s great for one-off jobs.

• Compress PDF files

  • PDF Compressor webpages (Smallpdf, ILovePDF, PDF2Go) quickly reduce file size; beware of quality loss for images.
  • Ghostscript (advanced, command-line) gives strong control over compression; use if you need repeatable, scriptable results.

• Edit text and images inside a PDF

  • LibreOffice Draw works for light edits and replacing images; best for non-professional layout.
  • PDFescape (web) and Sejda let you add/replace text and images for short documents within free limits.
  • For heavy edits, convert to Word with Smallpdf/Google Drive, edit, then recreate the PDF.

• Annotate, highlight, and take notes

  • Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (free) includes solid annotation tools.
  • Foxit Reader (free tier) is feature-rich and lightweight.
  • Preview on macOS also excels at annotations and markup.

• Fill forms and sign PDFs

  • Adobe Acrobat Reader DC allows filling forms and adding signatures.
  • DocHub and Smallpdf (web) provide form filling and e-signature tools with free usage tiers.
  • Preview (macOS) supports signing with trackpad or camera.

• OCR (convert scanned PDFs to searchable text)

  • Google Drive provides basic OCR when uploading images or scanned PDFs (via “Open with Google Docs”).
  • Tesseract (open-source, command-line) is powerful and scriptable; combine with a GUI like gImageReader for convenience.
  • OnlineOCR sites work for quick conversions but handle sensitive documents cautiously.

• Extract images from PDFs

  • PDFImages (part of Poppler tools) extracts images losslessly.
  • GIMP can open PDFs and let you export individual pages or images.
  • Web tools (Smallpdf, ILovePDF) also extract images for occasional use.

Desktop vs Web tools: when to choose which

Desktop tools

• Use desktop tools when working with sensitive documents, large files, or when you need offline, repeatable workflows.
• Good choices: PDFsam Basic, LibreOffice, Sumatra, PDFtk, Tesseract + gImageReader.

Web tools

• Use web tools for convenience, quick one-off tasks, or when you need a polished UI with conversions handled server-side.
• Good choices: Smallpdf, ILovePDF, Sejda, DocHub.
• Avoid uploading confidential or regulated documents to web services unless you trust their privacy policy and need.

Practical workflows and examples

• Merge invoices into one file for emailing

  • Quick (web): Use Smallpdf Merge — upload, reorder, download.
  • Secure/offline: Use PDFsam Basic — drag files, choose merge settings, save locally.

• Reduce a 20 MB scanned report to under 5 MB

  • Fast (web): Use ILovePDF/Smallpdf compress and check image quality.
  • Control (desktop): Use Ghostscript with a command like:

    
    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf 

    Adjust PDFSETTINGS to /screen, /ebook, /printer, or /prepress for different quality/size trade-offs.

• Make a scanned contract editable

  • Upload to Google Drive → Open with Google Docs for quick OCR, then edit and export.
  • For better accuracy, run Tesseract locally and then clean up output in LibreOffice.

• Sign a PDF contract on macOS

  • Open in Preview → Show Markup Toolbar → Sign (create or use saved signature) → Place and save.

Privacy and security tips

• Avoid web uploads for sensitive documents unless the service states files are deleted after processing and you trust their policy.
• For batch or automated tasks, prefer command-line open-source tools (Ghostscript, Tesseract, Poppler) that keep files local.
• Keep backups before editing; some edits are destructive (flattening annotations, losing form fields).

Short comparison table

Final tips

• Combine tools: use OCR (Tesseract/Google Drive) → edit in LibreOffice → compress with Ghostscript for best control.
• Keep a small toolkit: one desktop app for heavy work (LibreOffice/PDFsam), one web service for quick jobs (Smallpdf), and a reader/annotator (Preview, Acrobat Reader).
• Test on non-sensitive samples first to ensure formatting and quality meet your needs.