PDF Editor - Chaiware

PDF Viewer? Skeleton Editor? Full Editor?

When using PDFs we encounter several general uses of working with them.

PDF Viewers

Basic usage of PDFs, just viewing them, this is mostly used by Adobe’s own PDF viewer, but mostly PDFs are just viewed in the browser nowdays, this usage is really basic and won’t be discussed here.

Converting To/From PDF

This is an important feature, as many times we have an editable file (word for example), and want it in a closed format so it won’t be editable by the receiver.

This also won’t be discussed here as most application (Microsoft’s Office included) already incorporated this functionality into their application, so the user will just need to “Save as…” a PDF.

PDF Skeletal Changes

Skeletal changes of a PDF, I describe as changes to a PDF file without touching the actual contents.

So these changes will include:

* Exporting of specific pages from a PDF file, as separate files.

* Importing a PDF or even an image file as a page in a PDF file.

* Rotating specific pages of a PDF file

* Split/Merge/Order pages of a PDF file

This functionality is the most used functionality and a good and simple application is what I basically search for.

This functionality is the base for the applications comparison of this article.

PDF Editing

PDF Editing is an advanced feature for this type of applications and usually is coming for a price.

For this feature, I expect to be able to take a PDF and be able to edit it as a word file.

The best application for this is Adobe’s own Acrobat Editor.

But there are also other applications, most of which are not free.

And most of these applications are doing a mediocre job.

I won’t cover this advanced field in this article.

Requirements

The Rejected

Candidates

PDF24

PDF24 is not perfect but it supplies a surprisingly high slew of features.

From blackening parts of the PDF to basic split and merge.

The downside of applications with lots of features is the clutter and the bad user user experience, but this is not the case of PDF24, they built their software as modules, so if you want the to split a pdf then just start the pdf splitter module etc.

That is a great way to declutter your feature rich application, but it also has a big downside in the usability as you open the application you see lots of buttons and modules you can use, and that causes a very bad user experience then and there.

I don’t want a module to import a jpg to pdf, a different one for splitting and another one for merging, that is just bad software design.

PDF Arranger

This is a nice open sourced application – one which you download straight from github (don’t worry, it has an installer and all).

The application also makes sense, as it has the basic skeletal features in one app.

This is a great application which ticks all of the right buttons.

The only downside is that it is an ugly ui application, well, nothing is perfect.

PDFGear

Which gets us to PDFGear.

This could be a good application, although it is not opensourced, but alas, the user experience is so bad that I can’t vouch for it.

There is no graphical presentation of the pages, so if you want to delete page #3, you can surely do it, but you won’t see which page you deleted.

I totally need in this kind of app to have the option to see all pages of the pdf, and be able to click on a page and delete it or rotate, or export it as a new pdf etc.

So the Winners are

This is the best option for a one-in-a-while pdf skeletal editor, not the most beautiful, but open sourced, updated, works as expected with good-enough UI.

For the more advanced and more usage of PDF editing use this one, has lots of features and once you get used to it this is the most rewarding PDF editor app.