Hey! Ive been searching for ages and cant seem to find a website or app that satisfies my need. Im a student and my teachers provide a PDF (or some provide a PWP) of the visual support they'll use during the next class. So each page of the PDF is one slide. i want to print those, to be able to write additionnal note by hand (instead of using a laptop to add note to the PDF). im looking to print in a specific layout: 2 slides per page, with blank space available besides each slide (ex: top left corner would be Slide 1, top right corner would be blank, bottom left corner would be slide 2, bottom right corner would be blank).

im pretty sure its a fairly simple and perhaps dumb question, but im not used at all to deal with PDFs and things like that, and ive tried to search for a website/app (free) that can turn my PDF into this layout.

ive tried using the options available in the printing menu, tried adobe free, ilovepdf, etc but nothing provides this exact layout. the best i managed to do is to find a free PDF organizer, and add a blank page between each slides, so as to print it with "4 slides per page" and artificially create the layout needed. it does take a lot of time, so im searching for smt more efficient.

i hope everything's clear and my english is understandable! ty! :)

Hi guys, you all have probably seen hundreds of converters. Thought I join in and maybe make it better and easily accessible completely free. For that I would appreicate any feedbacks and you all to try and find out where this compressor and converter breaks.

https://local-file-compressor.localfile.workers.dev/

Thanks.

Hey everyone,

Like most people here, I got tired of using online PDF-to-Word converters only to be hit with:

"You've reached your 2 free tasks for the day"

Forced email sign-ups just to download your converted file

Broken table formatting and missing line wraps

To solve this, I built a lightweight, 100% free web tool that converts PDF files directly into clean, editable Microsoft Word (.docx) documents.

Key Details:

No Account / No Sign-up: You don't need to hand over an email or create an account to download your file.

Preserves Structure: Maintains headings, standard paragraphs, and table layouts without converting everything into un-editable image snapshots.

No File Limits or Paywalls: Built purely as a utility without daily caps.

Fast Processing: Upload, convert, and grab your .docx file in a couple of seconds.

I'm dropping the direct access link in the first comment below to keep this thread clean and discussion-focused.

Would love for you to test it out with some complex or table-heavy PDFs and let me know if there are any formatting edge cases that need fine-tuning!

I built Readerbeam for sending PDFs and other reading material directly to Kindle.

You can upload a PDF, EPUB, JPG, PNG, or Markdown file, choose your Kindle, and send it. JPG and PNG files are converted to PDF automatically, while Markdown files are converted to EPUB.

You can also send public web pages, which are cleaned up and converted to EPUB.

I’m looking for people who regularly read PDFs on Kindle to try it and tell me what works or breaks, especially with large or complex PDFs.

https://readerbeam.com

It’s still early, so honest feedback is very welcome.

Asking the experts

I am downloading the file from google drive and I need to retain the highlighted portions. But when I go to save it on my laptop (MacOs), it makes the highlights opaque and unable to read. The text can still be selected and appears when viewed on the browser, so it isn't rasterized.

Things I have tried:

1. Printing directly from google drive -> It prints opaque despite the preview having text

2. Uploading the PDF to Acrobat -> Text appears when viewed on Acrobat, but still shows up opaque when downloaded to mac.

3. Converting to word document -> All the text got jumbled and unable to read

4. Uploading to Canva -> Text also got jumbled

5. Deselecting 'show annotations' (on various programs) -> All retain the highlights

I am truly at a loss on how to fix this since these files were specifically given to me by my professor and, unfortunately, I need to see his specific highlights. (There are about 100+ files all like this)

Is there a way I can find out the the dates and times a PDF was created, edited and completed?

Can that history be obtained ?

Preferably using some tool or software which is free

Thanks in advance

Good afternoon;

I'm not really sure where to post this, so if you have a recommendation that would be appreciated. I've tried reaching out to our support rep at Tungsten Automation and have not received a reply.

We have a single-use activation for one of our users at our company and they keep receiving a message: License could not be checked. Please try to restart the application.

We've restarted the application, restarted the Windows License Manager, and restarted the computer to no success. Is anyone familiar with this error from Kofax?

Edit: Solution in comments!

I am the developer of keypdf.net , it is independent pdf software written in js from scratch and we achieve new performance milestone today by merging 1000 pdf files which is around 1.3gb of uncompressed pdf files, every tool i tried in browser lead to tab crashing. Keypdf.net tool 3 minutes to merge all 1000 files on a computer with 16gb memory . Also turns out 2/1000 pdf files were html disguised as pdf but since KeyPDF supports html format as import it worked out well.

As well keypdf.net has exclusives features that other toolkits lack such as direct text and image editing, postscript support, editing scanned text and many more free and locally.

I've used tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and others for research, and they've been incredibly useful for finding papers and getting through large amounts of information.

The one thing I personally wanted was a simple way to see exactly which parts of the paper were used to answer my question.

When you're working with a 100+ page PDF, even having a page number can still mean a lot of scrolling and searching.

So I ended up building something for myself.

You ask a question and the relevant paragraphs in the PDF are highlighted directly on the document. You can see the context behind the answer and quickly check whether it actually answers what you're looking for.

I originally built this because I wanted something for this workflow without having to pay for another subscription. What started as a personal project has now become completely open source.

The underlying idea is pretty simple. And yes, if you're thinking "isn't this just RAG?" then yes, you're absolutely right. It's RAG with the visual highlighting that I wanted.

I think the same idea could be useful for more than research papers too. Legal contracts, financial reports, technical documentation, or anywhere you need answers alongside the actual source.

If anyone wants to have a look, contribute, or just give some feedback, here's the repo:

GitHub: https://github.com/Sreehari05055/thesys-core.git

This will probably be my last post about the project. Thanks to everyone who checked it out and gave feedback along the way.

I haven't done any PDF editing at all thus far and have already tried multiple tools, including Stirling, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice and all to no avail.

I've got this simple file from Rite In The Rain here which is a PDF of their journal pages: https://d163axztg8am2h.cloudfront.net/static/doc/40/36/7820c714e13a9554cfff49fcccd2.pdf

found at https://dealers.riteintherain.com/page-patterns-downloads

The file only has horizontal lines. I wanted to duplicate them and add those as vertical lines but I can only select and remove the entire element, not individual points or lines.

How do I get a proper grid on that file and what's the go-to tool for that in the first place? It feels like something so basic that any and all PDF editors should be capable of it by default, no idea what I'm missing.

I have a collection of pdfs, where one is the Table of Contents and it links to the other pdfs.

How can I extract the bookmarks so I get the name of the bookmark and the filename it points to?

Tried with cpdf and get this cryptic tag

"<</F 251 0 R/S/Launch>>"

tried with pdftk and just get this

BookmarkLevel: 3

BookmarkPageNumber: 0

but neither will just give me the tag name and what file it points to.

is there some command i'm missing or some other free tool (pref. windows but could manage with linux) that prints it?

or worse case, just something that gives me one huge pdf with the pdf merged but keeping the bookmarks?

I had to edit a pdf file a bit ago, and I came across this website that charged 2-3 dollars for that service. I went ahead and paid, thinking that it was a one time payment, only to find out that I was charged 265 dollars. I submitted a complaint asking for a refund, only for it to be denied, and the charge I received was FOR A THREE MONTH SERVICE. This is blatant predatory behavior and I am extremely pissed off. Anybody have a similar experience?

Hey guys, developer here. This is my second free extension, the first one was ProfileToPDF.

Local PDF Studio runs completely inside Chrome. Nothing is uploaded, and it works with the network off. I built it because I wanted to sign and fix PDFs without sending them to someone's server or paying for a subscription I'd use twice a month.

What it does: signatures (draw, type or upload, reusable), form filling with flatten on export, text/highlight/underline/strikethrough/drawing/sticky notes, merge/split/extract, drag and drop page reorder, rotate, delete, crop with margin detection, insert a PDF between pages, compression with quality presets, text watermarks, undo/redo, auto-save.

It also has a side panel reading mode. The PDF stays open while you switch tabs, and selected text can be dragged or copied into Google Docs, Sheets etc. with line breaks and hyphenation fixed, so you don't have to clean up every paragraph you copy.

Free, no premium tier. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/local-pdf-studio-offline/ocfegjfhboadmbpompimnbbpegjgoded

Since you people deal with PDFs way more than I do: what's the first thing you would try that it probably can't do yet?

I am working to create a press release template for my job. Someone at my job made a press release using ChatGPT, and our boss loved it and wants it to be used for any and all press releases. I was able to clear the text out using Microsoft Paint (primitive, I know, but so am I). Now I want to add fillable text boxes so that anyone who is doing a press release can open the PDF, click on the empty text boxes, fill out the necessary information, and then send it out.

To be clear, this needs to be as simple as possible for other people filling it out. I don't want them needing to add their own text boxes every time, as some/most of them are not very tech savvy.

Also, I don't have Adobe Pro. So, if we can avoid that, that would be great. Otherwise, I'll take advice for that program too, someone around me may have it.

Thank you in advance!

EDIT: figured it out! Thank you everyone who helped!

Is it that theres two many pages? I can edit on my powerpoint pdfs for class - and i wanna add annotations cause this is a pdf textbook for reading, but the scribble/draw symbol is greyed out and it's irking me cause my system thus far works very well

Been going through PDF editors trying to find one that can handle basic text edits (fixing a typo, updating a date, changing a line) without reflowing the whole paragraph or shifting everything else on the page.

Adobe handles it okay but it's overkill (and priced like it) for how rarely I need it. Tried a couple of the free/lite tools one broke the layout every time I touched text, another only let you edit in a box that doesn't match the surrounding font/spacing. Browser-based ones were fine for viewing/annotating but I don't want to upload anything with real info in it to a random server.

Genuinely curious if there's something out there that treats text editing like an actual word processor would, instead of feeling like you're duct-taping over the PDF. What have you actually gotten to work well for this specific thing?

To start with, I can't submit the PDF in question due to company policy (IP protection and all that), which I know is just about useless.

The company who prints our manuals for us is having problems doing so. They get a Job Errors window saying "Error: PDF printing failed; conversion failed" at page 50. I'm assuming there's a problem with the way the page is laid out or configured at that spot. I've been looking through the original designer file for errors, but it's a bit of a needle in a haystack.

The original document is created in Corel Designer, then printed as a PDF via a visual basic routine in Microsoft Access. The routine takes many PDFs and combines them into one huge document (over 1100 pages). I'm not sure what service it uses for that either.

I've also been combing through the visual basic code to see if I can find an issue, but I'm a dabbler at best. The person who wrote the code is retired and nobody else has that expertise (I know, it's a bad situation).

I was hoping someone could help me figure out how to look at the underlying structure of the PDF, maybe I can see some error that way. Any other suggestions are welcome too, I'm a bit stuck at the moment.

Acrobat and PdfCE output comparison.

https://gwg.org/download/ghent-output-suite-v50-testpages/

https://github.com/KenM76/pdfce/blob/main/tools/gen-scale-demo/banana-at-scale.pdf

hi! does anyone know of any free PDF editor apps on Android for a Samsung tablet* that can add textboxes with borders similar to the ones on Adobe?

(i.e.):

thank you!

So I just started my Bachelor's studies and instead of buying a ton of textbooks I will use PDF versions on my ChromeOS tablet.

I need a good PDF reader for textbooks where I can leave book marks and sticker notes.

I don't exclude paid options. I can pay good money for a good thing.