PDFs and what can be done with them

Submitted by Fozzie on December 4, 2021

I thought it might be good to pool our nerdy knowledge on this one.

The file size for PDFs at Libcom is 32megs.

There's a trade off between file size and legibility. A few of us are self taught contributors to the site - whether we're scanning our own documents or finding them online and adding them here.

All the tools I use are online and free, but some of them limit the size of files you can use, or how many operations you can do in an hour or day:

https://www.ilovepdf.com/

A nice general tool for manipulating PDFs. Compression function is good. You can also merge, split etc. I use the "organise" tool quite a bit for moving pages around, deleting them, etc.

https://smallpdf.com/

Same as above, but much more restrictive in how many operations you can do at a time.

https://www.sejda.com/

This is the best tool I have found for cropping PDFs. Quite useful if you have a document which has been scanned as double pages and you want to change it to single page views.

https://www.onlineocr.net/

This is the best site I have found for Optical Character Recognition - basically extracting the text from a PDF or jpeg or whatever.

If you use other things, let me know!

adri

2 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by adri on December 5, 2021

you can do basically anything to PDF files (file format developed by Adobe) if you "obtain" a copy of Adobe Acrobat, including stuff like OCR conversion ("converting image-text to actual text" etc.). not sure how helpful that is, but it's basically all that I use when working with PDFs