Tom's Guide: 13 Free Tools for Viewing and Editing PDFs

How-to
By Jane McEntegart
published

Check out Tom's Guide's latest story on PDF viewers!

Sometimes you just need more than your bog standard PDF viewer. To that end, the Tom's Guide team has gone out and rounded up 13 tools that will allow you to view, edit, annotate, splice and stich PDF documents together. Be sure to check them all out in '13 Free Tools for Viewing and Editing PDFs.'

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has become something of a standard for sharing high quality digital documents. Unfortunately, many PDF readers only support a minimal set of tools for editing, annotating, or otherwise modifying PDF documents, and PDF publishing and editing suites, while powerful, can often cost an arm and a leg. Don't fret though, as there are a fair number of viewers that do more than just open PDF files, with loads of free tools to modify, split, merge, encrypt, or digitally sign these electronic documents.13 Free Tools for Viewing and Editing PDFs

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Jane McEntegart
6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jaber2
    Was foxit even included?
    Reply
  • AzureFlash
    Stay pleb, Foxit users. Sumatra (which isn't even on this list) is king. PDF-XChange, which is what Sumatra is based on, is acceptable as well however.

    You don't need 13 different programs to handle PDF, you just need one that does it reliably, elegantly and blazingly fast. That's Sumatra.
    Reply
  • Max Collodi
    jaber2Was foxit even included?I believe Foxit's editing features are a paid add-on.
    Reply
  • AzureFlashStay pleb, Foxit users. Sumatra (which isn't even on this list) is king. PDF-XChange, which is what Sumatra is based on, is acceptable as well however.You don't need 13 different programs to handle PDF, you just need one that does it reliably, elegantly and blazingly fast. That's Sumatra.I just gave it a try and it really is lightning fast. It can't add/remove pages, though. Or am I missing something?
    Reply
  • holdenn
    There is a really simple yet robust tool for extracting highlights and notes from your pdf-files available at: http://www.sumnotes.net . Not only it supports various advanced features like selective extraction or predictive extraction, but it also allows you to save extracted highlights into TXT or DOC files. All desktop browsers and operating systems are supported. We are in cloud, so no installation is needed. And yes, it is for free.
    Reply
  • Treegreenrock
    I can say that I've tried many of these viewers and I think I like Foxit Reader and CoolUtils PDF Viewer (was it mentioned here?), since they are simple and compact and user friendly enough to satisfy both beginners and savvies
    Reply