How To Digitize Your COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card

When you receive your COVID-19 vaccination, you are given a Vaccination Record card that records your name, birthday, the brand of vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J etc) and also the date(s) when you received your shots.

In the months ahead, some employers could start requesting proof of vaccination as workers return to the office. International travelers may also be required to prove that they have been inoculated prior to being allowed entry into their destinations.

Consequently, a lost Vaccination Record card could be a real headache and creating a digital backup by scanning it to a PDF file may be worthwhile.

Luckily there are many apps that can assist you to do just that. In this post, we are going to use the Notes app for iOS as this is available for free for all iOS users. Android users may use apps such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Scanbot.

To get started, place your Vaccination Record card on flat (preferably dark) surface and position your phone directly above it. Open the Notes app, create a new note and then tap the Camera button. From the pop-up menu, select "Scan Document". The app will automatically detect the edges of the card and will take a photo of the card without any user input. Hit the Save button and the card will be saved inside the note.

If you are signed into iCloud, the note will automatically be backed up to the iCloud service. To save the card to another cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, tap the card that is saved inside the note to open it and then hit the Share button to open the iOS Share Sheet. From here you can choose which app to send the card to.

You can now rest easy knowing that your Vaccination Record card is backed up and safe.

Automating PDF Find & Replace Using All-About-PDF Command Line

Imagine you arrive at work and your manager calls you into their office and tells you that they have a special task for you. You see, the law firm you work for has just landed a new client and inherited a bunch of cases; consequently they now have over 80,000 PDF documents that need to be searched for certain words and each one needs to be replaced with random words. This is going to be an ongoing task for your role going forward. 

You are probably about to have a very bad week. Or is that months?

Unless of course you download All-About-PDF and use the new Find-Replace Command Line feature. This feature allows to create a special file that contains the entire Find-Replace definition including the find-replace pairs, the location of the PDF files etc. Once defined and saved, you can then run All-About-PDF with a special command to this file and it will process all the documents in the background while you get more important things done! 

Hey the week isn’t looking so bad after all? Let’s see how this works.

First create the special (JSON) file to hold the Find-Replace definition. Have a look at the sample below for all the fields available. This file should be saved on the same PC that All-About-PDF is installed on.

{
    "fileName":"C:\\My Documents\\Reports\\*.pdf”,
    “findReplacePairs":{"Binky":"Pacifier","Trash":"Garbage","Sidewalk":"Pavement"},
    “useRegex":true,
    “pageRange":"1-3, 5-7",
    “underline":false,
    “strikethrough":false,
    “outputFolder":"C:\\My Documents\\Reports\\Processed",
    “findReplacePairsFile":"C:\\My Documents\\Automation\\FindReplaceValues.txt",
    “showResult":false,
    “fileNameSuffix":"_processed"
}

The available fields are as follows:

View fullsize

You may also store your Find-Replace pairs in a separate text file by using the simple format below. This file can then be referenced in the JSON file above for the findReplacePairsFile field e.g.

Trash=>Garbage
Binky=>Pacifier
Sidewalk=>Pavement
Blinker=>Indicator

To put it all together, you can use the command below to run All-About-PDF to process your files.

%programfiles%\All-About\PDF\all-about-pdf.exe /findreplacewjsonfile {the path to the json file}

A real world usage of the above:

%programfiles%\All-About\PDF\all-about-pdf.exe /findreplacewjsonfile {C:\My Documents\Automation\findreplace.json}

As you can see, this advanced feature of All-About-PDF is a great time saver in carrying out a task that would otherwise be impossible to get done manually.

To get started with processing your PDF documents, download All-About-PDF today!

Top 5 Ways All-About-PDF Can Help Organize Your Tax Documents

If you are in the United States, then you probably know that tax season is just around the corner if not already underway. Its that time of year where we have to show and prove to Uncle Sam how much money we made (or lost as the case may be) last year.

Depending on your situation, this process can mean downloading mortgage statements from your bank, W2s from your employer, 1099s from wherever they usually live and more.

These documents are of course all in the ubiquitous PDF format and also contain varying levels of personal and confidential information.

I am yet to meet a person that enjoys the process of preparing taxes so here are 5 ways All-About-PDF can help organize your documents prior to sending them to your accountant.

1. Merge The PDF Documents: instead of sending or uploading all these files to your accountant in a piecemeal fashion, merge them all together into a single PDF document with a table of contents using All-About-PDF so that your accountant knows exactly where what is located.

2. Split Out or Delete The Unnecessary Pages: In some cases, you don't need to send your entire document to your accountant as all the information they require is on a single page. Use All-About-PDF to split your PDF to keep only the pages you would like to send to them.

3. Redact/Find-Replace Information: If there is information in the documents that you would rather not send to your accountant, use All-About-PDF's Redact or Find-Replace feature to remove or obscure specific words from your documents.

4. Compress PDF Documents: Once you have organized and merged your PDF files together, you will likely find that the file size is on the larger side. All-About-PDF's compress PDF feature can help you reduce the size of the document back to a more manageable size so that you can easily email it to your accountant.

5. Password Protect Documents: Last but definitely not least, protect your private information by adding a password to your PDF(s) so that only your accountant has access (be sure to send the password in a separate email from the document(s))

6. (Bonus) Set PDF Expiry: whilst not applicable in most tax situations, you can still use All-About-PDF to not only set your PDF documents to expire after a certain date but also to ensure that the documents can only be viewed in a certain country or domain.

What other ways has All-About-PDF helped you process your PDF files? Drop us a mention on Twitter @allaboutpdf.

If you haven’t tried All-About-PDF yet, there is no time like the present. Hit the button below to download it now!

How To Set a PDF To Expire Days After Being Opened

As useful as setting an expiry date on a PDF is, sometimes you just don’t know if the person you are sending the PDF to will have a chance to review the document in time. This is especially true for course materials where it is useful to protect the documents with an expiry date but the actual courses may have multiple student intakes with varying starting dates. It can be useful to set the PDF to expire so many days after the student opens the course material; the course duration for example.

In All-About-PDF, you can set a PDF’s expiry date to be relative to when the document is first opened. This is achieved using our ground-breaking digital rights management (DRM) technology.

Let’s look at an example of how to set a PDF file to expire 365 days after being opened. Follow the steps below:

1. Download and open All-About-PDF

2. Click on the SET EXPIRY button

3. Click the “…” button and select the PDF file you would like to process

4. Select the Use All-About-PDF DRM option

5. Select the Expire X days after first viewing and set the number of days to 365

6. Check the box for Use internet time… so that the document expiry cannot be bypassed by changing the user’s system date

7. Provide a custom message for when the PDF expires.

8. Hit the GO button and apply the settings to the PDF. The document will be saved with a PDFE extension in the same folder as the original file.

To get started with protecting your PDF documents with a relative expiry date, download All-About-PDF today.

PDFS4LIFE Update

We would like to thank everyone that has bought, downloaded or shared All-About-PDF. Because of you, we have been able to provide assistance to the children of St Mary’s Nursery, Nkhotakota over the past year.

Even though the nursery closed for a few months due to the pandemic, our contributions to the PDFS4LIFE fund did not stop. Consequently, the nursery school is now in greater shape than ever and is ready to welcome the children back.

To welcome the new nursery school intake, we recently held a get-together for the children from the nursery school as well as those from the surrounding villages and by end of the event, we had entertained and fed over 500 children!

Here are a few photos that were taken during the event:

From the children of Sani, Nkhotokota, and from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for supporting PDFS4LIFE!

DRM Protected PDFe Files

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM) Protection

Digital Rights Management is a far-reaching term that refers to any scheme that controls access to copyrighted material using technological means. In essence, DRM removes usage control from the person in possession of digital content and puts it in the hands of the copyright owner.

What are PDFe Files?

All-About-PDF’s PDFe files are encrypted PDF documents that have an expiry date. They allow the document author to specify when the PDF document is no longer valid. In the near future, these documents will include more features such as geolocation lock (where a document can only be viewed in specific regions), domain lock (the document can only be viewed by users of a specific Windows domains) and remote kill-switch ability (the document author can remote render the document invalid).

These features are very useful for authors of valuable intellectual property such as online course materials, engineering designs, architecture drawings etc. This allows the authors to share their copyrighted material while maintaining full access control to their intellectual property.

In order to maintain high security, the PDFe file specification is proprietary to All-About-PDF and can only be opened by our special document readers.

How To Open AND VIEW PDFE Files

iOS and iPadOS PDFe Viewer

Once a PDFe file has been created in All-About-PDF, there are three ways of opening and viewing it.

1. Using the free PDFe Viewer for Windows: you can be download this from our downloads page

2. Using the free PDFe Viewer for macOS: you can download this from our downloads page

3. Using the free iOS and iPad app: this can be downloaded from the Apple Apple Store

4. Using our free online PDFe viewer: you may access the online PDFe Viewer using Chrome web browser at this address.

All of the above methods of viewing PDFe documents do not allow saving or printing of the original PDF document.

How To Convert And Save Email Messages To PDF

There are many reasons a person would want to save an email to PDF including archiving purposes or sharing an entire email thread in a more readable form. Lets also not forget the options that become available once the email has been saved to PDF such as password-protecting the PDF for security.

With so many platforms and email applications available to us, what are the best ways to save email messages to PDF?

Windows

If you are using Microsoft Windows, the best way to save email messages to PDF regardless of the email client is to use a PDF Print Driver. The latest versions of Windows come with a PDF Printer so you don't even need to download a third party solution. For older versions, there is a plethora of PDF Print drivers online and once one has been installed, saving the email to PDF is just a matter of going to the print menu and selecting the PDF Printer.

macOS

If you are using the default mail client, Apple Mail, in macOS, you can save an email message to PDF by selecting "Export to PDF" from the File menu.

If you are however using another application that doesn't have a dedicated function to export email messages to PDF, you can use “Save As PDF” from the system print dialog.

Android

Similar to Windows, exporting email to PDF is just a matter of printing the email to PDF and then selecting where you would like it saved.

iOS/iPadOS

Some mail apps in iOS have dedicated functionality to export messages to PDF where as others don’t. For those that don’t, such as the default Mail client, you need to select Print from the Share menu. Once the print preview is displayed, use the 2 finger pinch-out gesture to expand the first page; this action automatically converts the email to a PDF which can then be shared or saved.

Merge PDF Files

No more unorganized documents! Combine multiple PDF files together with All-About-PDF

Merging PDF files is becoming more and more popular across the globe for its common uses in business, education, e-learning, and more. Its a feature that is easily available on desktop software as well as online.

Before people could merge PDF files, one of the solution employed to combine multiple PDF files was to print them out to paper and then rescan then all together to create a single file. This was obviously a waste of time and paper.

Now PDF Merging software like All-About-PDF allows you to combine multiple PDF files in any order that you want for easy viewing and sharing.

How is PDF Merging Useful?

PDF Merging has countless uses. Imagine you are at work and need to share documents with colleagues. Instead of sharing so many disparate files that can be confusing and easy to lose track of, it is much easier to combine all the PDF files into a single file.

Or lets say you are a university student working on a group project with other students. Since every student completes their work separately on individual PDF files, you need to find a way to combine all the PDF files together prior to submission.

Not only that, merging PDF files is also great for solo projects. You can use it to organize your portfolio for job applications, organize your tax documents, manage kitchen recipes and more!

All-About-PDF lets you combines unlimited PDF documents into a single document and does it so fast you won’t believe your eyes. Furthermore, you can choose to use the desktop tool or the online version.

Click on the MERGE button to select PDF files to combine

It is very easy to merge PDF files using All-About-PDF.

1. Open All-About-PDF from the Start menu

2. Click on the MERGE button

3. Select 2 or more PDF files that you would like to merge together

4. You can also specify to use wild cards in your files names, for example, you can specify “*.pdf” to merge all PDF files in the given folder into a single file.

5. Click the MERGE button and specify where you would like to have the new file saved

To get started with merging PDF files, download All-About-PDF today or check out the FREE online version.

PDF Reader Biz (Foxit) Breached

From the Infosecurity Magazine:

Foxit has detected that unauthorized access to some of its data systems has taken place, including access to its ‘My Account’ user account data. This means that data you have entered on our website when signing up for our services has likely been accessed by hackers,

Compromised information could include user names, email addresses, their company names, phone numbers, passwords and IP addresses.

This is just another reason we at All-About-PDF do not require our users to create accounts just to use our software. We simply do not wish to be responsible for holding your personal information if we cannot guarantee that we can keep it secure.

Inspired By Tacos4Life, PDFS4LIFE

Last week, for lunch, I took my family to Tacos4Life. I ordered their delicious Korean BBQ steak Tacos and enjoyed every bite of it. As I sat there enjoying the summer atmosphere and the food, I couldn't help but admire their mission to "Eat a Meal. Give a Meal". Basically, for every taco, rice bowl, quesadilla, salad or nachos you enjoy, $0.22 is donated to Feed My Starving Children. Meal 4 Meal.

That amount might not seem like much on its own but with every meal purchased, they have donated over 10 MILLION meals to children in need.

What Tacos4Life has achieved has really inspired me to create the PDFS4LIFE initiative. I asked myself, what if a percentage of every All-About-PDF sale was donated to a similar cause. That too could make a difference regardless of how small it seems. As the Dalai Lama once said:

Children from Sani village having lunch

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito."

After our lunch, I WhatsApped my family and friends on how best to approach this and landed on an idea from my mother who lives in Sani (Nkhotakota), Malawi.

She suggested to start off by donating 5% of every sale to a village nursery school where she volunteers. The nursery school is operated by St Mary's Anglican Church and runs almost entirely on volunteers and donations. The nursery school not only teaches the children from the surrounding villages, they also provide clothing and meals for them. It is not an exaggeration to say that for most of the children, the food they are given at the nursery is the only food they see that day.

Together with the church, we have now set up a dedicated bank account for PDFS4LIFE and we will be donating 5% of all our All-About-PDF sales to them on a monthly basis.

This is a cause that I am very passionate about and I can't wait to see what a difference it makes to the children of Sani, Nkhotakota.

For detailed information about this initiative, please see our dedicated page here.

Introducing All-About-PDF Subscription Licensing

One of the main reasons we decided to create All-About-PDF was to offer a PDF toolkit application that people could download, buy and use without having to worry about yet another subscription payment. In bucking the industry trend and offering a single perpetual license cost, where buying a license means that you own the software forever, coupled with our ease of use and powerful feature-set, our offering has become very popular.

We have been getting a lot feedback from existing and potential users and there is a question that keeps popping up and that is:

how come we do not offer a subscription licensing model and will we ever offer one in the future?

Well, the thing we care more about than not forcing users into a paying a monthly fee to use our software, is giving users a choice. Whilst we may not be in favor of subscription plans for software, we can also acknowledge that there are users out there that prefer this model of payment.

We are therefore pleased to announce that, starting today, you can choose to pay for All-About-PDF in two ways:

Perpetual Licensing: as before, we will continue to offer a perpetual license for the price listed on the pricing page. Once purchased, you 100% own that version of All-About-PDF forever and are entitled to free support and upgrades (new features and bug fixes) for 12 months.

Subscription Licensing: With this newly introduced model, instead of paying a single price of $79.99 (as of writing this article) for the perpetual license, you only have to pay $7.99 per month to use All-About-PDF. Once you decide you no longer need to use the software, you can cancel your subscription and the software will cease to work.

We are very excited to be able to offer both the perpetual and subscription models to our All-About-PDF users. To get started and make your choice, head over to our pricing page.

Save Time By Converting PDFs to MS Word Or Other Formats Using Watch Folders

If you spend a lot of time convert PDF files to other file formats such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPG and more, then you know how tedious it can be.

There are of course many tools that you can use to carry out PDF file conversion but almost all of them require you to either manually upload the files and then download the results or open the software on your computer, select the files and then run the conversion process.

When you have to do this more than a few times a day, week or month, it can become a tiresome chore.

Watch Folders To The Rescue!

In a nutshell, Watch Folders allow you to convert PDF files to other format by just dropping them into a folder

You can use Watch Folders by defining one or more folders that All-About-PDF monitors and what conversions to automatically carry out as files are added. Once the Watch Folder is defined, you don’t even need to open the app to convert the files; you just drop it into the Watch Folder.

Setting up Watch Folders couldn’t be simpler.

1. From the application’s main window, click on the three dots in the top right side to open the menu

2. Select Watch Folders

3. Hit the Add (+) button to create your Watch Folder

4. Select the folder you would like All-About-PDF to monitor

5. Specify the filter you would like to use. The default is *.pdf however you can use any filter as long as it has the .pdf extension

6. Select the conversion actions that you would like to occur when a file matching your filter is added to the Watch Folder.

7. Select folder where the conversion output should be placed. This folder cannot be the same as the Watch Folder.

8. You may also specify if you would like All-About-PDF to delete the original PDF file in the Watch Folder and whether or not to overwrite any existing files in the Output folder.

9. Once saved, the Watch is live and you can begin dropping it like its hot!

To get started with Watch Folders and more, download All-About-PDF today!

Get the full version of All-About-PDF for FREE

Free All-About-PDF Full License for Content Creators

All-About-PDF is the best PDF processor on the market that allows you to merge, split, compress, password-protect and convert your PDF files to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPG Images and more. With its sleek “material-design” inspired look, it is fast and easy to use.

And you can have the full license for FREE!

If you are a content creator (blogger, vlogger, internet columnist) you can request an All-About-PDF License, if you create content about us.

In order to be eligible for a free license, you must meet the following conditions:

• Original content: The content must be original and recent and created as a review.

• 500 words: For blog articles, the article should contain at least 500 words, with a link to https://allaboutpdf.com and a screenshot.

• Share your content: Following the publication of the content, you need to use at least one of the content sharing services, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Reddit, to share your opinion about All-About-PDF.

Write Us

To request your license, please mail us with your name and a link to your blog post. We will get back to you as soon as possible with a free license.

Have We Had Enough Of Subscriptions?

This article on variety.com talks about how nearly half of US consumers are frustrated by subscription services and I couldn’t agree more.

One of the main reasons I decided to create All-About-PDF as a desktop application with a perpetual license model (pay once and you own the software forever) was that when I tried to find a tool to merge PDF files offline, the majority of options that were available were offered as subscription services.

Nearly half (47%) of U.S. consumers say they’re frustrated by the growing number of subscriptions and services required to watch what they want, according to the 13th edition of Deloitte’s annual Digital Media Trends survey. An even bigger pet peeve: 57% said they’re frustrated when content vanishes because rights to their favorite TV shows or movies have expired.

Even though most subscription services appear to be priced low, the mounting number of subscriptions that we or our business have to pay for on a monthly basis can easily add up to hundreds of dollars. A wise man once said:

Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves

Read the full article here.

Using a PDF Scanner App On Your iPhone To Scan Documents

If you are anything like me, you likely receive important documents in the post, things like tax documents, bank statements etc and then you put them somewhere "safe" only to completely forget where you put them a few weeks or months later.

It is for this reason that I now scan and convert all important documents and store them in my Dropbox as PDF files. This way I (or more accurately, my wife) no longer end up turning the house upside down to find that one document as I can easily find them by searching by file name and contents through Dropbox.

There are many ways to scan documents to PDF using your iPhone or Android device. All examples in this article will use iPhone references however there are similar equivalents on the Android side.

Using the Notes App

The built in Notes app has been able to scan documents since iOS 11.

1. Place the document you would like to scan on a dark background with no direct lighting so that there are no reflections.

2. Force touch the Notes app icon and select "Scan Document” or open the app, create a new note and select "Scan Document" from the “+” menu.

3. Position the document as straight as possible in the camera view.

4. The Notes app will delect the edges of the document and take a photo automatically when its ready

5. Once the page has been scanned, you can scan more or edit it by cropping, rotating it or changing the color style.

5. You can then share the PDF to other apps like email, messages, Dropbox or AirDrop it to your computer.

Using the Dropbox App

Scanning documents to PDF using the Dropbox app on your iPhone is similar to using the Notes app.

1. Start by force-touching the Dropbox icon and select “Scan Document” or open the app tap on the “Create” icon and then select “Scan Document”

2. Align the document in the camera view and the app will count down prior to scanning the document

3. As with the Notes app, once the document is scanned, you can edit it or scan more pages to add to it.

4. Dropbox then allows to specify the file name and type (PDF or PNG) and also where you would like the document saved.

5. Once saved, it will then be available to all your computers that have access to your Dropbox account within seconds.

There are many other PDF scanner apps that offer the ability to scan files to PDF using your iPhone or Android, so many that we can’t cover them all in this blog. The user flow is however very similar as is the quality of the resulting scan.

To do more with your PDF documents such as merging them together, splitting them into multiple documents, adding password protection or converting them to other formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint or Microsoft Word and more, check out All-About-PDF for Windows or All-About-PDF Online.

New Features Alert - Feb 2019

We are proud to announce the release of All-About-PDF Build 1042 which features:

Ability to convert PDF to MS Excel

You can now use All-About-PDF to convert one or more PDF files to Microsoft Excel (xlsx). When All-About-PDF converts a PDF to Excel, the resulting Excel file is a fully editable Excel document.

Ability to Use Text From A PDF Document for File Naming When Splitting PDF Files

When splitting a single PDF document into multiple files, you can sometimes end up with a lot of files. The last thing you want to have to do is to rename every resulting file manually as this can take a lot of time and effort. All-About-PDF’s latest feature allows you select an area of the PDF page that it will then use as the file name automatically. For example, if you had single PDF document with pay-slips for 1000 employees, a pay-slip per page, you naturally want to split the PDF document and send each page to the respective employee.

You can now use All-About-PDF to read the area of the PDF page where the employee’s name is located so that when the document is split up into 1000 separate pay-slips, each one is named after the employee’s name. This feature is such a great time saver and more information about this can be found here.

A big thank you to our users Tim and Paul for requesting the features that we have added to the latest release of All-About-PDF. We hope all our users will find them valuable as well.

If you have any feedback or would like a particular feature implemented, get in touch and let us know!

To try the features and more, download our free version or use our online web application.

How To Convert Webpage To PDF

There are many way to share websites or to bookmark them for reading later. One thing I like to do is to convert a webpage to PDF so that I can add it to my tablet for reading offline. This is handy when flying since airline WiFi (when available and working) still costs an arm and a leg.

Converting a webpage to PDF is very easy and can be done with just about any web browser.

To convert a webpage to PDF in Google Chrome:

1. Open the webpage that you would like to convert to PDF

2. On a Mac, select "Print" from the File menu. On Windows, go to the the top right menu (three vertical dots) and select "Print". Alternatively, you can just press Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) + P.

3. Click on the "Change" button and then select "Save as PDF" as the destination printer

4. Hit the "Save" button and select the folder where you would like the converted webpage to be saved.

If you are using Safari on a Mac, you can convert any webpage to PDF by selecting "Export to PDF" from the File menu.

For Microsoft Edge users, the process is similar to that of Chrome's.

1. First browse to the webpage that you would like to convert to PDF

2. Press Ctrl+P to bring up the Print dialogue

3. Select the "Microsoft Print to PDF" printer

4. Hit the Print button and you will prompted on where to save the converted PDF

Unfortunately for our Firefox users on Windows, you have to download a third party plug-in to convert a webpage to PDF and if you are still using Internet Explorer then please see this article.

Convert Webpage To PDF on iPhone or Android

When you are out and about and are on your mobile device, converting webpages to PDF on iPhone/iOS or Android is just as easy.

On iPhone, in Mobile Safari, open the webpage you desire to convert and then tap the Share icon. From the Share sheet, select "Convert to PDF"; this will convert the webpage to PDF and open the PDF for preview. You can then use the Share sheet once again to save the PDF to iBooks for reading later, cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive or share it via Messages, WhatsApp, Email etc.

To convert a webpage to PDF on Android devices, you will need to download Google Chrome if its not already installed.

1. Open Google Chrome and go to the webpage that you would to convert to PDF

2. To the right of the address bar, tap the three vertical dots and select "Share"

3. Select Print

4. Select "Save as PDF"

5. Tap the Save icon

6. Now you can select where to save the converted PDF.

What Next?

Now that you have converted your web page to a PDF, there is more you can do with it. You can split the PDF into multiple pages, you can add password-protection, you can compress the PDF to save storage space and you can even convert it to other formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint or JPG. Our PDF toolkit, All-About-PDF, allows you to do all of the above and more. To get started, download the Windows version or try out the online web application - all for FREE.

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Best Free PDF Reader 2019

There is no shortage for free PDF readers on the interwebs and they all vary widely in features and functionality. We looked at a lot of free PDF readers and came up with what we feel are the best PDF readers on the market today.

Our decision was not based purely on features, we also took into consideration how focused and convinient the product is. So, without further a-due, here is a our list of the top 5 free PDF readers in 2019:

SlimPDF Reader

We love SlimPDF because of how focused and convenient it is; sure it doesn't have as many features as the others in the list however if all you need is to read PDF files, SlimPDF’s small footprint makes the smallest dent on your computer and installs fastest.

FoxIt Reader

FoxIt Reader has the familiar Microsoft Office Ribbon interface and that makes it approachable to new users. We especially love its security features that can disable javascript in the PDF to prevent malicious code from running when the document is opened. FoxIt Reader also has downloadable add-ons that can add to the functionality of the base application.

FoxIt Reader’s Office Ribbon UI is familiar

Nitro PDF Reader

Like FoxIt Reader, Nitro PDF Reader also comes with the faimilar Microsoft OFfice Ribbon UI. This application packs more advanced features such as ability to add sticky notes to PDF documents, ability to add annotations and also abily to extract images from PDF files. The only downside to Nitro PDF Reader is that it requires user registration before you can use it.

PDF-Xchange Editor

We have been fans of PDF-Xchange for many years and have utilized their PDF Printer Drivers in many projects. While the application's UI is not the prettiest, it does offer OCR (optical character recognition) that allows you to scan documents and have them saved as searchable and editable text. PDF-Xchange will however watermark the output files that are processed using its "pro" features.

Your Web Browser

You read that right! Most modern browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari all have built in functionality to open and render PDF files.

How to Merge PDF Files

View fullsize

The PDF format is the default document sharing format for professionals online and offline. It is therefore useful to be able to manipulate these files with ease.

One of the most common tasks when it comes to manipulating PDF files is to merge multiple PDF files together. There are several programs that offer to do this for you however the majority require you to upload your documents to unknown third-party servers or require a monthly payment to unlock the software features.

With All-About-PDF, you can combine multiple PDF files into a single file without having to upload it to a remote unknown server in three simple steps.

1. If you haven't already, download All-About-PDF from here. Once downloaded, install it and run it.

2. Hit the "Merge" card and select all the PDF files you would like to be merged together. You can add more files by hitting the "Add More" button and you can re-arrange the order of the pages by dragging and dropping the pages into the required order.

3. When you are happy with the order of the files to be merged, hit the "Merge" button and then provide the name of the new merged PDF.

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Your PDF files will now be merged into a single file and the pages will be in the order you specified.

To get started with merging your PDF files, download All-About-PDF from here.