How to manipulate your PDFs
I have been playing with PDFs a lot recently, and evidence-based medicine makes them increasingly necessary. Luckily, the days where you needed Adobe Professional to manipulate files are quickly receding.
Creating PDFs
Mac users have the advantage when creating PDFs, with the ability to print any document to PDF from within the print menu. Furthermore, PDFs can be printed to specific locations, like a web receipts folder, or to your filing program (I use Together).
When I need to use Windows, I use Cute PDF, which is free and small. I have used this in Parallels to export images and other files to the Mac desktop.
Manipulating PDFs
Preview, the PDF viewer that is bundled with Mac OSX allows basic PDF editing. PDF documents can be merged or reordered using drag and drop. Blank pages can be added, and pages can be cropped. If you need this functionality and you are not with your mac, you can try online services such as PDFHammer, which allows similar basic editing.
Free online services extend this functionality. PDF Undo Online converts PDF files to Word documents. There is no registration required, but copy protected or scanned PDFs can not be converted.
If you have scanned PDFs that you wish to convert to text without an OCR, it is worth trying to use Google’s bots to do the work for you. For this to work, you need a domain that is indexed by google.
What are your favourite (free) PDF manipulation tools? Please share your links in the comments.
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