We come across PDF documents on the internet all the time and read them using
Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader). While this would
seem to be the end of the story, is it in fact anything but. In this
article I’ll be discussing various tools for dealing with PDFs, and
some of the ways in which those tools allow us to make much better
use of PDF technology. The majority of these tools are free, and
where they are not, I will indicate this.
. It is similar to Adobe
Reader, but much ‘lighter’ and quicker. It has
highlight text,
write notes and and make various proof-reading comments, which you
can save with the document.
Alternatives: Sumatra PDF (tiny and
simple, but perhaps too basic); Adobe Reader (excellent at reading PDFs, but ridiculously bloated and slow); PDF-Xchange Viewer (larger than Foxit, a huge range of annotation tools). If you use a reader without a
‘typewriter’ and just want to fill out the odd form, you could
try https://www.fillanypdf.com/,
a website which allows you to upload PDFs and fill them out online
(registration is required)
PDF Makers
A PDF retain the layout and (usually) the fonts used of the
original document, so other people can see the document, read it and print it exactly as you do, without having to worry
about whether they have the same software, fonts or system configuration as you. It is therefore very useful to be able to create PDFs on your PC.
Microsoft Office 2010 has a built-in
PDF-saving function, as does Open Office/Libre Office. You can also download a
free add-on for Office 2007 to do the same. Still, if you want to
create a PDF from another program (I regularly create PDFs of my
confirmations of online purchases, which are displayed on web pages on in my email), then you need a different tool. There are many
such tools, and to be honest, most are excellent.
My preferred tool is PDFCreator. It is a very flexible tool and is completely free.
Alternatives: There are plenty! Primo PDF,
CutePDF Writer
and doPDF are all excellent PDF makers. Particularly noteworthy is PDFill PDF Tools (free) which includes both a PDF maker and an editor (see below).
Editing PDFs
The PDF format was not indended for editing. In fact, part of the raison d’etre of PDFs is that they
provide a ‘fixed’ version of the document which all recipients
can use in the same way. Still, while producing PDFs, it is
useful to be able to do some basic ‘page level’ editing, such as
removing individual pages, combining multiple PDFs or rotating them.
Without doubt, the most powerful
editors without doubt are Adobe Acrobat Standard (£320) and Adobe
Acrobat Professional (more expensive yet), but there are a plenty of
other tools which are free or low cost. Here are two:
PDFill PDF Tools (free) has a wide range of options, including merging and splitting documents, rotating, cropping, conversion to/from images, page numbering and many more. 
PDFTK Builder has a smaller range of options, which can be a good thing if as long as it has the options you need... If you have never used such
a tool, you may be a bit put off by it initially, but once
learned, it is very easy
to use.
Converting PDFs “back” to Word or Excel
format
I ocassionally get asked if it’s
possible to do this. The answer is yes, sort of. The problem is that
PDFs are essentially program (yes, software!) which
instruct the computer how to draw the pages. They are not,
generally speaking, constructed to represent the internal workings of
the original document (for example, the text flow inside a PDF is not
necessarily identical to the one in the document used to create it).
‘Reverse converters’ of the type discussed here therefore need to
‘look’ at the document, 'read' it and figure out the intention of the
writer, a process much like converting scanned text to editable text
(OCR). The results are well, variable.
In my experience, commercial
products such as ABBYY
PDF Transformer 3 and PDF Converter Professional 7 (both cost around
£40) produce usable results as long as you do not expect the document to be
identical to the PDF! Free products are in my experience less successful, to such a degree that at present I would not recommend any of them.
Oron
Joffe
