PDF tools

Here are a bunch of tools I found for reading, editing, and more with PDFs. I have not tried all of these but they all look promising.

Read

• Sumatra PDF is the best PDF reader for Windows.
• The default PDF readers on other platforms seem to work well.

Edit, annotate, sign, or fill

• SimplePDF is an in-browser PDF editor.
• Some browsers, such as Firefox, include PDF editing tools. You can select a PDF and “Open with” a browser.
• PDF Annotator is for signing and annotating PDFs.
• Zotero can save PDFs from websites and includes a PDF reader that lets you add annotations.
• DocuSeal is an open source DocuSign alternative for creating, filling, and signing documents.
• ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools for manipulating images, including PDFs by using Ghostscript.

Add a text layer using optical character recognition (OCR)

Some PDFs don’t come with a text layer. Adding one makes them searchable, copyable, etc.

• OCRmyPDF
• PaddleOCR

Convert

• Pandoc converts files between many formats.
• this HN discussion covers and compares several tools that can be used to generate PDFs using HTML and CSS.
• htmldocs is a React library for building and generating documents.
• HTML to PDF conversion API | html2pdf.app
• Automate PDF Document Generation | CraftMyPDF.com
• Cloudmersive’s document and data conversion APIs
• Pdflayer API | Free, High Quality HTML to PDF API
• PrintFriendly converts many file formats to PDF for better printing.
• PrintWhatYouLike.com lets you print the good parts of any web page while skipping ads and other junk.
• Marker converts PDF to markdown, optionally using OCRmyPDF.
• MinerU converts PDF to markdown or JSON, optionally using PaddleOCR.
• Bank Statement Converter converts PDF bank statements to Excel’s XLS format, though most banks let you export CSV files.

Scanning paper documents

• Paperless-ngx helps you scan, index and archive all your physical documents.
• pydigitize uses OCRmyPDF and other tools to convert paper documents to PDFs ready for archival.

Search

• ripgrep-all is like ripgrep, but also searches PDFs and many other file types.
• Zotero saves data alongside each saved document to make them easier to find.

Organize

• Zotero is excellent at organizing research. It’s probably the best citation manager.

Compare

• Diff-pdf is for visualizing the differences between two PDFs.
• PDF-Diff is another tool for visualizing the differences between two PDFs.

Security

PDFs are not just static files. They can contain code. For example, someone built Tetris in a PDF. Below are some tools that could help with PDF security.

• VirusTotal can analyze files, websites, and more for security threats. This online service makes submissions public.
• Jotti’s malware scan also scans files.
• zbetcheckin’s PDF analysis is a collection of tools for analyzing PDFs for security threats.
• here’s an HN discussion that lists various tools for analyzing PDFs, such as to look for malicious code.
• Canarytokens.org can create PDFs and many other things that notify you when they’re opened by certain applications to help you detect security breaches.
• Submit a file for malware analysis | Microsoft Security Intelligence. Use this for files that you believe are malware or are incorrectly classified as malware by Windows Defender.

Automation

• ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools.
• OpenPDF is a Java library.
• Apache PDFBox
• QPDF

Collections

These applications and websites are collections of many PDF tools.

ImageMagick might also be able to do many/all of these, but requires more technical skill as it is a suite of command line tools.