#FreeToolTips – 10 Free PDF tools for Teachers
August 14, 2018 by admin
Free PDF tools? But “Nothing in life worth having comes for free.”
That is so 90’s.
Most of the things in life worth valuing has no price tag. It is true at least as far as free tools are concerned!
We have so many free tools in the market that it makes it very difficult to make an informed decision. We often fall back on a paid tool, just because we think it is more secure or user friendly or popular (since it is paid for)! All these are preconceived notions. Times have changed. Most of the premium tools out there offer at-least a base service for free. These services/tools as as good or even better in some aspects than many of the paid tools out there. Most of you already know that. You just doubt it. So here’s help.
We care for our educators at TheWorksheets.com. We believe that you guys deserve a good platform so that you can impart education in the best way possible. So that we have a future generation worth rooting for. And the planet has a future! We have thus planned a series of blog posts which would give you clear understanding about free tools. So that you can make an informed decision about what you need.
We will set upon this journey by introducing the list of free pdf tools. We know you love our worksheets. Our worksheets are in pdf format since it is the widely used format for printables. So we are bringing you the list of best pdf tools. You might already have some. But you might need to rethink the paid ones 😉
Adobe is the market leader. They have a trusted high quality tool that allows you to view and print your PDF files. It also lets you interact with PDF content, highlight, bookmark etc including multimedia. Other features covered are adding and verifying digital signature, annotating on PDF pages, creating and filling out PDF forms, and printing out these documents. It is however a little bigger in size compared to the contemporaries. Talk about best free PDF tools!
This is probably one of the most user-friendly free PDF tools that offer so many features. It provides the most important functions such as merging, splitting, reordering, rotating and cropping pages and even allows you to add headers, footers and watermarks. It also offers additional features such as encrypting and decrypting security options, and deleting, flattening and adding form fields. However it requires GhostScript and Java to run. Still one of the best free PDF tools.
This is an open source PDF tool used which allows you to easily reorder or merge selected pages. It is also capable of splitting and rotating pages and adding stamp and encryption to your file. Aside from those mentioned it doesn’t offer too much and even lacks the basic function of watermarking with background text.
by CompSoftDoro PDF Writer is very easy to use and light version of a PDF tool. It is installed as a virtual print driver and converts any printable document or image to PDF format. Doro is compatible with XP, Vista, Windows 7 and 8. It doesn’t have all the other options that other PDF tools have but it works great in printing PDF files. This tool can be powerful as it lets you set the author name and even protect it with a password before conversion. Just select it from the program’s setting menu before printing a PDF document and it will launch and provide you the option to change the document’s metadata. They also give features to enable and disable copying, pasting and printing functions of the document.
by BioPDFBullZip is another PDF tool that works as a virtual print driver and uses Ghostscript to convert documents. Like Doro, it also allows you to convert printable document or image to PDF format but on top of that, it also lets you add watermarks, merge PDF files and even add protection to your PDF files. It is free for up to 10 users and offers installation of promotional, third party components. You may check the guidelines here.
CutePDF is one of the most popular PDF tools out there. It basically installs as a new Printer on your computer and whenever you want to create a PDF document, you’d just print to the CutePDF printer. It’s fast and generates small PDF files. The other great thing about CutePDF is that it has some advanced features like an API, so that you can integrate PDF creation ability into your custom applications and even into a Citrix or terminal server environment! It works on all operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows 10 64-bit edition. Undoubtedly amongst the cutest free PDF tools!
doPDF is similar to CutePDF in terms of the features it has to offer. It’s a basic PDF creator and gives you the ability to control the output quality and searchable PDFs. However, other prgrams mentioned above has all this and more features. It does support 64-bit systems and doesn’t require GhostScript like CutePDF Writer. Pretty straight forward amongst the free PDF tools.
It can be a good choice when you want to get as many features as you can in just one application. It lets you merge, split, reorder and rotate pages, and add watermarks and encryption too. You can also digitally sign PDF documents using it. There are features for attaching files to PDF and editing metadata as well. jPDF Tweak requires Java 5, or even higher, to run. It uses iText library to manipulate PDF documents and JGoodies Forms for its GUI.
It’s not nearly as basic as CutePDF Writer and almost has the same number of features as Bullzip except for 64 bit support and some lacking watermark abilities. PDFCreator also has a server install program that can be setup on your print server and therefore used across the network without having to deploy it to each computer individually. If you don’t need all the features of Bullzip, this might be the best option for a small business network.
- Direct Print from browser – Now here is a teaser. If you are looking for the most basic function, ie – just take a print out of the pdf file you have previewed, you dont need a PDF tool!! These days browser comes with inbuilt capabilities to preview and print pdf files. So, if you are printing stuff from websites as awesome as ours, you don’t even need a PDF tool!! You can directly click on print from browser. (screenshot ->)
