Ah, PDFs. Those ubiquitous little files that we all love to hate. Generally considered a universal file type, they’re impactful in both good and bad ways. Due to their size, they take longer to download due to slower transfer speeds than other file types, for example. And if you’re adding one as an attachment to an important email, most people will probably be annoyed by it because you’ll be slowing down their email client and taking up space on their phone or computer and what have you. Either way – email? SPAM! But there’s definitely a time when PDFs are useful for sure! You may want to know about the best online PDF tools so you can create your own or convert other files into pdf format if needed.
Sitting in your warm office, you’re reminiscing about the last mountain-climbing expedition you went on to climb Mt. Everest. So much sweat and hard work — but it was totally worth it! You’ve got this whole “working from home” thing down to an art, no? Grabbing a mug of coffee, you head outside to your front porch — the front porch that’s perfectly visible for all of your neighbors across the way. With a smile (and maybe a hat) on your face, and your favorite PDF editing program waiting for you, you start to relax…for just a moment though. For reasons you aren’t quite sure of, a certain thought comes into your mind…
From the day of its inception, Best Online Pdf Tools has grown to be a perfect and final destination for every Pdf-related solutions. We aim to help users create, edit, sign and convert PDF files online righteously without any hassle. In addition to our reliable, user-friendly and innovative services, we are happy to offer great customer support to all our users 24/7.
Edit your PDF files for free with our online PDF editor! You can add text, images, and signatures, white-out and highlight content, and more. Edit your PDF file online and for free. A majority of the tools in this package are 100% free to use.
What are the best free PDF editors?
Your best option if you need a free PDF editor is PDF Candy. It has many features you’d normally pay for, including excellent text scanning and a number of file-conversion features.
PDFescape runs a close second to PDF Candy, offering very good annotation and form-creation and editing tools for its free service. (There are also two paid tiers.)
Mac users need look no further than the PDF-editing tools that come with their MacBook or iMac. Preview is built into macOS and includes both image-editing and annotation tools. It should be your first stop if all you need to do is attach an electronic signature to a PDF.
We’ve also tested FormSwift, a good option if you work with forms, and Smallpdf, a basic program that excels at converting files. Like Preview, Smallpdf is good for adding electronic signatures to documents.
PDF Candy
Best free PDF editor
SPECIFICATIONS
Cost: FreeDeveloper: Icecream AppsCompatibility: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, SafariCategory: OCR, PDF editing, file conversionTODAY’S BEST DEALSVIEW AT PDF CANDY
REASONS TO BUY
+OCR capabilities+Extensive features for converting, creating files+Solid layout tools for PDFs
REASONS TO AVOID
-Limited text editing features
Our new pick for the best free PDF editor is PDF Candy, because it offers something many free options do not — an OCR feature for scanning text. You can’t edit OCR’d text in this web-based PDF editor, but you are able to upload PDF files and extract text and create a text document, RTF file, or Word document in both .doc and .docx formats.
You can choose from 44 tools to create or convert PDF files. It’s also easy to rearrange pages within a document, add watermarks, protect PDF files with passcodes, edit metadata within a PDF file, split or add pages to documents, and extract images. Actual text editing is pretty limited, the trade-off you make to enjoy a fairly feature-rich free PDF editor.Advertisementhttps://f9121dbf4e96b8f10fd7f1b4a221824c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Once you’ve made your edits in PDF Candy, you can download the edited document or upload a new document to work on. PDF Candy keeps all of your documents in a queue so you can download them all at once after you’ve finished making changes to them.
PDFescape
Best PDF-annotation tool
SPECIFICATIONS
Cost: Free; $36/year for premium accountDeveloper: Red SoftwareCompatibility: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, SafariCategory: PDF annotationTODAY’S BEST DEALSVIEW AT PDFESCAPE
REASONS TO BUY
+Web-based annotation tools are easy to understand and use
REASONS TO AVOID
-Extremely limited font options when you add textAdvertisement
PDFescape is a basic, web-based PDF-editing and -annotation program you can use for free to work on PDF documents that are smaller than either 10MB or 100 pages, whichever is greater. (PDFescape used to limit you to 50 pages, so the higher limit is a welcome change.) If you need to edit larger files, you can upgrade to a premium account for $36 a year. There’s also an “ultimate” plan for $72 per year.
Accessible through any modern web browser, PDFescape offers no OCR capabilities like PDF Candy does. But PDFescape’s annotation tools are easy to use. You’ll find a pretty solid set of standard annotation tools that can easily add, highlight and strike through text; insert notes; and otherwise mark up the pages of your PDF file. Using the web app’s insert tools, you can also add new images and text to a document, white-out text, and add web links and form fields.
PDFescape does have some major limitations in adding new text. Because there are no OCR capabilities, you can’t make changes to existing text; you’re limited to adding new text to an existing document. Additionally, the app has very limited font options, as it doesn’t use any of your computer’s fonts. So you’re limited to Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Verdana and a Signature font for signing documents.
Preview
Built-in PDF annotation for macOS
SPECIFICATIONS
Cost: Free with macOSDeveloper: AppleCompatibility: macOSCategory: PDF annotationTODAY’S BEST DEALSVIEW AT APPLE
REASONS TO BUY
+Excellent annotation tools+Easy-to-use signature capture+Markup features are often available in other apps
REASONS TO AVOID
-Locating annotation tools not obviousAdvertisement
Apple’s Preview app is built-in to the macOS and offers a minimalist but valuable set of tools for marking up any PDF file. You won’t find full-on PDF editing here. But if you need a basic set of tools for highlighting or redacting text, making notes, or adding comments to a document, you won’t likely need much more than what’s already available on your Mac.
Preview’s markup tools are hidden when you first open a PDF document. To see them, you’ll have to look for the small pencil icon that appears near the Spotlight search bar at the top of your PDF document’s toolbar. Clicking this reveals a small set of tools you can use to select text and add objects, text or notes to your document.
The app’s standout feature is a signature tool you can use to store a signature you create using your trackpad or scan using your Mac’s iSight camera. You can then easily add that signature to a document by clicking Preview’s Signature tool. Simple and easy to use once you set it up, Preview’s signing feature will prove its usefulness every time a digital document requires your John Hancock.
You can access all of Preview’s editing tools without opening Preview, as long as you’re running macOS 10.14 Mojave or later. Just use QuickLook to view a PDF, then turn to the Markup button in that mode.
PDFelement Pro
Best Prices Today: $79.99 at Wondershare
Offering many of the same features as Adobe Acrobat Pro, PDFelement Pro is notable for its straightforward simplicity, overall usefulness, and affordable price.
PDF Reader Pro
Best Prices Today: $0 at Microsoft Store
If you need just a simple, free PDF editor to accomplish some basic tasks, PDR Reader Pro is the one. It can’t create or convert PDFs, but it allows editing, annotating, and sharing, which covers the needs of many people.
Perfect PDF Ultimate
A beginner-friendly PDF editing suite
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Very user-friendly+Solid functionality+Downloadable from Microsoft Store
SoftXpansion has developed Perfect PDF Ultimate, which is described by the firm as an ‘all-in-one’ application for processing PDF files. Available to buy direct from the Microsoft Store, this user-friendly software is perfect for viewing, editing and creating PDF documents.
Features include the ability to edit page content, generate interactive forms, comment on existing documents, as well as being able to convert, combine and split files. You can also add e-signatures and encryption to important business files.
PDF Expert
PDF editor with the cleanest interface
SPECIFICATIONS
Cost: $80 one-time license purchaseDeveloper: ReaddleCompatibility: macOSCategory: PDF editorTODAY’S BEST DEALSPDF ExpertUS$75PDF Expert£54.99VISIT SITEat PDF Expert
REASONS TO BUY
+Clean, easy-to-use interface+Editing tools appear when you need them and hide when you don’t
REASONS TO AVOID
-Couldn’t handle large files-Mac-only
Readdle’s macOS-only PDF Expert is a popular PDF-editing tool that allows you to make changes to text in existing PDF documents, including by removing and replacing images, updating text, and adding text of your own. PDF Expert lacks OCR capabilities, so if you want to edit text in scanned documents, you’ll need to look beyond this program.
Of all the apps I tested, PDF Expert has the cleanest interface and therefore was the most pleasant to use. Two tabs appear at the top of the screen: Annotate and Edit. Clicking one of them gives you an appropriate selection of tools to perform either annotation or editing tasks.
PDF Expert’s editing tools are flawless. Click text in your PDF, and tools for editing text will slide out so you can make changes. Select an image, and tools for changing the image appear. You can move selected text anywhere on the page you want or remove it altogether.
PDF Expert struggles with large documents; otherwise, this would have been my top pick for both macOS and Windows. But every time I attempted to open my nearly 450-page test file, PDF Expert hung. Until this program behaves more dependably, look elsewhere if you tend to work with larger documents.
Sejda PDF Desktop Pro
Too many limitations
SPECIFICATIONS
Cost: $63/yearDeveloper: SejdaCompatibility: macOS, WindowsCategory: PDF annotationTODAY’S BEST DEALSVIEW AT SEJDA
REASONS TO BUY
+Can edit text, though on a limited basis+Can add images and annotate your documents
REASONS TO AVOID
-Very limited features-Paragraphs are treated as individual lines of text-Cannot remove or edit existing imagesAdvertisement
Sejda is a web-based PDF-editing application that works on any OS that has a modern web browser. A desktop version converts that web interface into something that runs on your computer.
You can use a free version of Sejda, but it limits the number of daily tasks you can perform and the size of the documents you can access.
To get the most out of the program, you can buy an annual license for both the web and desktop versions for $63. A perpetual license for the desktop version is a one-time payment of $126, but it doesn’t give you access to future updates or the web version. You can also buy a weekly pass for both versions for $8 if you’ve got a one-time project that requires Sejda.
Sejda has no OCR engine, so you can’t use this app to edit PDF files created from scanned documents. You can edit only PDF files that already have selectable text.
To edit your PDF file, you upload it to the Sejda website and then use the toolbar at the top of the page to choose your tools. You’ll find tools for editing text, adding links, adding form fields and images, and signing or annotating your document. All of Sejda’s tools are rudimentary at best.
The app breaks every line of text in your document into a single text entry, so you can’t edit entire paragraphs of text. When you do edit existing text, remnants of the previous text often get left behind in the document. Sejda will let you add new images to a document, but you can’t use the app to edit or remove existing images.
Sejda isn’t a great app, but it works in a pinch when you need to make a quick change to an existing PDF document and you have no other tools at hand.
How to choose the best free PDF editor for you
Picking the best free PDF editor is a lot like picking a paid version of a document editor — identify exactly what you want to do with a PDF file and go for the program that offers the features that will let you get that done.
This can be as simple as deciding whether you need a PDF editor that handles document creation and design or whether you just want something that can leave comments and suggestions on a digital file.
Because this is free software, you should pay attention to any limitations imposed on the free tier. Are there restrictions on the size of the documents you can edit or are certain tools locked behind a paywall? If the answer to the latter question is yes, figure out whether it’s worth it just to pay up for that particular feature.
If you’re doing your PDF editing from a computer, check to see if you’ve got built-in software that can handle the job. Mac users, for example, might not realize how good Preview is at annotating documents and adding signatures to PDFs. You can save a lot of time searching for the best free PDF editor if it’s already there right under your nose.
Conclusion
Free pdf tools are readily available; what is not as obvious is how to choose the best free pdf tools. You need to understand why they are free before you can see what actually makes them the best. A good place to start looking for best free pdf tools is right in front of you: on the internet, of course!
PDF tools are a collection of web-based PDF creation and PDF conversion services, that are completely Autodesk FREE & easy to use. With as little as 3-lines-of-code, you can implement robust, multi-threaded PDF creation and conversion features for your server and desktop applications.