16 Free Online Tools for Working with PDFs
An email conversation with a medical librarian recently reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make a list of the free online tools for working with PDFs that I’ve bookmarked.
Converting to/from other formats and PDF
- https://www.pdfonline.com/convert_pdf.asp
Converts files of the following formats (up to 2 MB) to PDF:
MS Word (DOC | RTF)
MS PowerPoint (PPT)
MS Publisher (PUB)
MS Excel (XLS)
HTML (MHT)
Text (TXT)
JPG , GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, EMF, WMSite also has free tools for converting URLs to PDF and for converting PDF to .doc
- http://online.primopdf.com/
Will convert to PDF from the following formats:
123, bmp, cgm, csv, dbf, dif, doc, dot, dxf, emf, eps, gif, hwp, jpeg, jpg, jtd, jtt, met, mml , odb, odf, odg, odm, odp, ods, odt, otg, oth, otp, ots, ott, pbm, pcd, pct, png, ppm, pps, ppt, psd, pts, ptt, ras, rtf, sda, sdc, sdd, sdp, sdw, sgf, sgl, sgv, slk, smf, stc, std, sti, stw, svm, sxc, sxd, sxg, sxi, sxm, sxt, sxw, tga, tif, tiff, txt, vor, vor, wb2, wk1, wks, wmf, wpd, wps, xbm, xls, xlt, xlw, xml, and xpm
- http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
Adobe’s own online conversion service converts HTML or text to PDF, or PDF to HTML/text.
- http://www.expresspdf.com/
Converts Word, Excel or HTML files to PDF.
- http://www.zamzar.com/
In addition to a bajillion other conversions, Zamzar will convert .csv, .doc, .docx, OpenDocument formats, .ppt, .pptx, .pub, .wpd, .wps, .xls or .xlsx files (up to 100MB) to PDF. Zamzar will also convert PDF to doc, html, odt, pcx, png, ps, rtf or txt
- http://www.youconvertit.com/ConvertFiles.aspx
Among lots of other conversions, converts to PDF from a number of file formats. It’ll also convert from PDF to AVS, BMP,CIN, or CMYK
- http://rss2pdf.com/
Converts the text of an RSS feed to a PDF
-
http://www.htm2pdf.co.uk/default.aspx
Give HTML2PDF a URL or a mess of HTML and it’ll output a PDF
Editing PDFs
- http://www.pdfhammer.com/
PDFhammer will let you do some lightweight editing online, including appending PDFs to each other, deleting pages, or changing the order of pages.
- http://bookletcreator.com/
BookletCreator is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.
- http://www.pdfescape.com/
PDFescape will let you add things to PDFs like text fields (for filling out forms), arrows, shapes and “white-out”.
Screen capture from editing:
Sharing PDFs
- http://www.scribd.com/
You can think of Scribd as sort of a YouTube for PDFs (and other kinds of documents). You can upload and tag, share, and embed documents as flash objects. The example below is an embedded version of Eugene Barsky’s handy Google “Cheat Sheet”:
- http://www.docstoc.com/
Another YouTube for documents.
-
http://www.pdfmenot.com/
PDFmenot is another way to view a PDF without an installed reader (or to post one online that users won’t need a reader to view). See example (again using Eugene’s PDF) by clicking here.
- http://issuu.com/
Issuu lets you upload a PDF and either share a link to a flash viewer (sort of like PDFmenot) or embed it on a Web page. Click on the embedded version will launch the full-screen viewer. The example below was again made with Eugene’s handout.
This is far from a comprehensive list. Do you have a favorite that isn’t mentioned?
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March 12th, 2008 at 10:59 am
NLM’s own non-corporate web-based DocMorph, also as an app via MyMorph
March 12th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Hi Nikki-
Y’know the conversation with a medical librarian I mentioned at the top of the post? It was about the fact that MyMorph had temporarily been down and this had severely interrupted her work.
-David
March 12th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Yikes, alternate resources are definitely good things. I had to stumble upon DocMorph and have come across many others in the field who had no clue it exists so I promote it a fair amount. Anything to help stats for NIH funding
March 12th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
[...] http://davidrothman.net/2008/03/12/16-free-online-tools-for-working-with-pdfs/ [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Wow – that Issuu thing looks amazing when you open it. Is that really free? Will def upload my writings there soon.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am
thanks for sharing. never seen anything like Issue b4, its more like youtube because you can share the small previevs.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
One of the advantages of using a Mac is that document to PDF conversion is built into the OS. The print dialogue box gives you a choice of exporting any document as a PDF.
March 16th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
[...] 16 Free Online Tools for Working with PDFs – from DavidRothman.net. [...]
March 16th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
[...] Remembering the discussion about PDFs a while ago, I was excited to see this collection of 16 Free Online Tools for Working With PDFs that David Rothman put together.There are options to let you convert documents from Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and other formats to PDF, and back, edit them, add text boxes, share documents, and view PDFs without Adobe Reader (is that even legal?!).I just begged my IT department at work to give me the version of Adobe that lets you turn documents into PDFs, because I had to go ask the other administrative assistants to do it for me and it was making me look weak in the eyes of the office. I feared for my standing as Official Desk-Ruling Badass! By which moniker, it will not surprise you to learn, I am commonly known about the workplace. Anyway, it’s too bad I didn’t see this list first, but since I’m not always at work, it still promises to be useful at some point in the future. [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
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