PDF

Fifty-five PDF tools is more than anyone wants to read through, so here is the shape of them. Most jobs are one of four things: changing what pages there are (merge, split, rotate, reverse, remove blank pages, divide, n-up, booklet, poster), changing what is on a page (the PDF editor, redact, watermark, page numbers, sign, crop, deskew), getting the content out (to text, images, Markdown, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, SVG), or changing the file itself (compress, password, remove restrictions, sanitize, metadata, flatten).

If you are not sure where to start, start with the PDF editor. It does the page organising, the annotating and the in-place text correction in one place, and its save screen offers compression, splitting, n-up, booklet, poster, greyscale and passwords on the way out — so a job that would be four tools is usually one visit.

Two things worth knowing before you pick. Compression only helps if there is something to compress: a text PDF is already small, and most of the saving in a big file comes from the images inside it, which is why a scan shrinks dramatically and a report barely moves. And a scan has no text in it — it is a picture of words. Extracting or correcting text needs a PDF that has text; for a scan, read it with OCR first.