Working with PDFs has become as common as working with Word documents, but to get full editing capabilities in Adobe Acrobat, you need to pay $449 for the desktop version or almost $180 per year for a Pro DC subscription.
Although there are many free PDF editors that work no worse than Adobe Acrobat. Most of them are available online: you upload the file to the site, edit it and save it to your computer. But such services often have limited functionality compared to desktop programs for Windows. Therefore, in the list below, we have added a couple of solutions that can be installed on your PC for free.
Microsoft Word
If you already have Microsoft Word 2019, 2016, or 2013 installed, you can safely skip all the options below. All you need to do is launch Word, go to the File -> Open menu section, and specify the location of the PDF you want to edit.
Word will automatically convert it to Word format (as in the screenshot above) using the built-in PDF Reflow function. After that, you can easily add new paragraphs, edit or delete sentences. You can also change the page size, margins, line spacing, font, as well as all its attributes, and much more. Naturally, the entire interface will be in Russian, as is the case with most of the programs in this review.
Once you have made the necessary changes, go to the main menu and select "Save As". In the drop-down list, select PDF, not Word Document format, and click the "Save" button. That's all you need to do!
Smallpdf Online
Online service Smallpdf works absolutely free. With its help, you can add or remove text, import images. To start working, you do not need to register, pay for removing watermarks and perform other tedious actions. It is enough to upload a PDF file from your computer or cloud storage Dropbox or Google Drive.
In addition to standard editing, you will be able to add three different shapes: a square, a circle, and an arrow. If desired, you can change the main color of the object, as well as the color and thickness of the stroke lines. Different fonts and text sizes are available. If necessary, the typed text can be highlighted in a different color.
Attention! The service has a paid version. If you edit two documents within an hour, you will be prompted to switch to it from time to time. But you don’t have to do this at all — if you’ve exhausted the limit of available corrections, just wait an hour.
Sejda
At the service Sejda There are several interesting features. For example, importing files from other sites, adding hyperlinks and signatures. Using the service, you can insert blank pages, delete unnecessary ones, and format text with graphic elements.
After editing is complete, the PDF is saved without a watermark, which is good news. After all, most similar programs automatically add a watermark in their free version. The second advantage is the availability of a desktop version. You can work with the program online or use the desktop version, which has more functionality. For example, it simply has more fonts.
There are also some disadvantages. For example, you cannot process a large number of documents in a short time. The service allows you to process only three PDF files per hour. The document should not contain more than 200 pages, and its weight should not exceed 50 MB.
LibreOffice Draw
LibreOffice Draw is a part of the office suite LibreOffice. It can be used to create diagrams, process images, and edit PDFs.
So, select the File tab, then Open, and select the desired document on your computer. If the file contains many pages, wait a few minutes for it to finish processing. On a computer with 16 GB of RAM and an Intel i5 processor overclocked to 4 GHz, it took 2 minutes to open a 536-page document, but it was worth the wait (see screenshot above).
Let's look at the pros and cons of the program. The advantage of LibreOffice Draw is that it can be used to edit any text on the page using a large number of functions. The file after editing will not contain watermarks. The only downside is that you need to download the entire set of programs to use only the PDF editor.
PDFelement
Free version of the program PDFelement works great overall. But it has a significant drawback - it leaves a watermark on each page. However, it does not take up much space and does not create any discomfort. If you are not embarrassed by this small nuance - feel free to install it. After all, PDFelement works just fine in all other respects.
It's time to talk about the advantages of the program, of which there are quite a few. With its help, you can edit text directly, without copying it to other programs, as well as add images, links, your own watermarks, change the background, create headers and footers, combine several files into one, crop pages. The program also supports OCR technology, can delete or insert pages, and even set a password to open a document.
PDF-XChange Editor
Editor PDF-XChange Editor adds watermarks to edited documents only if you use additional functions that are not included in the free version. The program will kindly warn you about this if you try to run such a function. When editing text normally, no marks are added.
The advantage of the program compared to desktop competitors is that files can be imported from SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox. It is possible to change existing text, add new text, delete or create pages. The edited document can also be saved in any of the above-mentioned cloud services or on a home computer.
PDF BOB
PDF BOB — is an online PDF editing service that is completely free to use. The service allows you to not only edit and comment on documents, but also perform other actions such as merging PDFs, setting a password, writing embedded notes, and much more.
Once the file is uploaded, you can change the font and text color, background color, size, and more. The Highlighter tool lets you highlight sentences in different colors. If you make a mistake, you can undo the last action with the Undo button.
Using the tools in the Manage Pages tab, you can add new pages, delete unnecessary ones, and even import another PDF to merge it with the open one. The edited file can be exported not only to PDF, but also converted to DOCx, DOC, JPG, and PNG.
PDFescape
When working with an online service PDFescape It is important that the document contains no more than 100 pages and takes up to 10 MB. Then it can be used for free. But a more significant disadvantage of the service is that it does not allow changing existing text or editing images.
With the help of the service, you can add new text, images, links and other elements. It is very easy to work with new text: you can change the size of characters, underline, italicize, etc. You can also draw, cross out, erase individual words, insert lines, check marks, arrows, write comments. In addition, PDFescape allows you to delete individual pages, cut their parts, change the order and insert pages from other files.
If you need the functionality of editing existing text, then pay attention to PDFescape Desktop - this is a version for installation on a computer as a separate program. For $ 6 per month you will get this opportunity.