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.

• Sumatra PDF is the best PDF reader for Windows.
• SimplePDF is an in-browser PDF editor.
• Zotero includes a PDF reader that lets you add annotations to PDFs, and makes it easy to save PDFs and info about them from websites.
• Pandoc converts files between many formats.
• Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript® language and PDF files.
• ImageMagick is a suite of command line tools for manipulating images, including PDFs by using Ghostscript.
• OCRmyPDF performs optical character recognition (OCR) to add a text layer to PDFs, making them searchable, among other benefits.
• Marker converts PDF to markdown, optionally using OCRmyPDF.
• MinerU converts PDF to markdown or JSON, optionally using PaddleOCR.
• pydigitize uses OCRmyPDF and other tools to convert paper documents to PDFs ready for archival.
• Diff-pdf is for visualizing the differences between two PDFs.
• PDF-Diff is another tool for visualizing the differences between two PDFs.
• PDF Annotator is for signing and annotating PDFs.
• Bank Statement Converter converts PDF bank statements to Excel’s XLS format, though most banks let you export CSV files.
• 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.
• this HN discussion covers several tools that can be used to generate PDFs using HTML and CSS.
• here’s an HN discussion that lists various tools for analyzing PDFs, such as to look for malicious code.

Security

• VirusTotal can analyze files, websites, and more for security threats. This online service makes submissions public.
• zbetcheckin’s PDF analysis is a collection of tools for analyzing PDFs for security threats.
• Canarytokens.org can create PDFs and many other things that notify you when they’re opened to help you detect security breaches.

Collections

These applications and websites are collections of many PDF tools.

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