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.

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.