How To Work With PDFs

PDFs are an incredibly annoying file format. It’s incredibly rigid and hard to work with, among other technical reasons. The only thing it’s good for is preserving how a document looks so it looks the same¹ of different devices which is useful when you want to print of you want to store a document at a point in time. PDF does mean Portable Document Format after all. Unless you care about how a document looks, you should use another format, like a website for forms or Excel/CSV files for data.

If you’re forced to use a PDF, here’s what I’d suggest. I’ll try to keep this page up to date as I learn new techniques for working with PDFs.

Just Use PDF24!

Seriously! It probably does what you want and it works offline and online.

Things like rearranging pages, converting pages to images, coverting images to pages, compressing them, running OCR to make the text searchable among other things.

Though PDF Gear Looks Nice As Well

I haven’t used it but PDF Gear looks slick and does what PDF does. I just find it too slick and it’s the sort of app that will upsell you in the future.

If You Have A Mac, Preview Works as Well

Preview on MacOS is incredibly underrated. While the interface isn’t clear, it let’s you do a lot of things with PDFs.

No, I Won’t Recommend Adobe

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro would probably solve all your problems, but it costs money which I’m trying to avoid here.

Filling Forms

Ideally, the form creator would make the PDF fillable in the first place, but they usually don’t.

Still, you can fill a PDF in many different ways.

• Nativley on iOS or MacOS via Preview.
• Though a web browser. Firefox and Edge are great at this though I’d suggest Firefox since it let’s you add images to PDF like a signature unlike Edge.

As for Android, IDK.

Edit a PDF

Find the original document and save yourself the headache.

“But I don’t have it”, you say.

In that case, open it in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Draw and fuck around with it until something happens.

Make a PDF Accessible

You should do this so that people can use your PDF regardless of their disabilities.

I don’t know how to do this if I’m being honest but your best bet is to ensure that your source document is accessible to begin with. That means paying attention to document structure, color contrast, alt text for images among other things. Look at the US government’s Section 508 PDF accessibility guide, Harvard’s PDF accessibility guide or the PDF accessibility guide by British Columbia, Canada provincial government.