5 Advantages That Every Good PDF Editor Should Have

Whether you are a solo entrepreneur, a freelancer or part of a team within a large company, creating, managing and editing PDF documents should come as no surprise. After all, PDF is a very versatile, lightweight and editing-friendly format that can easily be shared and collaborated on, both in-house and over cloud-based collaboration platforms. Here is when it is important to know what traits a good PDF Editor has. 

Whether for digital publishing, digital marketing, statistical data sharing or compressing multimedia content with visuals, PDF can be utilized in a plethora of accessible ways. However, settling for a professional, functional and user-friendly PDF editor which you and your team can safely rely on indefinitely can be difficult, especially if you are working with a limited budget. 

That being said, there are several very important factors to consider when choosing your PDF editor in 2020, not the least of which revolve around their compatibility with other software on your local machine. With that, let’s take a look at several practical points which every good PDF editor should have in its code in order for it to be considered viable for your personal and professional needs going forward.

Customizable Editing and Formatting Features

The most important and quite frankly, elementary feature of any good PDF editor lies in its editing functionality. A reliable and well-designed PDF editor should allow for full customization of its functions to cater to your personal needs. This allows for a higher degree of control and organization for the user, especially when dealing with dozens or even hundreds of PDF files simultaneously which require a systematic approach to editing. 

Whether it’s adding new text, modifying existing multimedia or commenting on content without touching the original, professional PDF editors should allow the user to do exactly what they need to. Combined with writing tools such as Studicus and Evernote, settling for a good PDF editor with a wide array of formatting, editing, and customization options should always be the top priority.

• Multi-Format Conversion Capability

While a plethora of file formats can be turned into PDFs, the process should never be a one-way street. As such, a good PDF editor should allow its user to move back and forth between file formats, whether it’s written content, pre-print materials, or presentation slides that you need to work with. 

Samantha Nicole, Chief Content Editor at WoWGrade spoke on the matter recently: “While you may be verse at utilizing spreadsheets or creating images for printing, your file’s recipients may not be as familiar with them. Using PDFs to standardize B2B communication, file-sharing and content production is an amazing way to minimize your margin for error and maximize your productivity – all of which can be achieved if you settle for a good PDF editor.”

• OCR Functionality

Optical Character Recognition (OCR for short) remains one of the pivotal elements of professional PDF editors for a good reason. Once PDF files have been converted into JPEG, PNG or other visual-only equivalents, editing their text content is effectively impossible without OCR. 

As such, finding a PDF editor which does allow for OCR and can facilitate your text editing and formatting even if a file has been flattened and turned into an image is highly recommended. Settling for anything less will ensure that your productivity is ground to a halt, as you will have to recreate, manually edit and otherwise reproduce any and all textual content contained within the flat PDF file. However, should you find yourself in that situation, there are several avenues you can explore and utilize to get your content turned into written form for editing purposes:

Hemingway Editor – a platform which revolves around making sure that your content’s flow is legible and easy to understand for the viewer, useful for additional content-checking during editing

Trust My Paper – an outsourcing platform with a plethora of written content services, including rewriting, editing and proofreading

Grammarly – a writing tool with extensive grammar, spell checking and content editing functionality, great as an assistant tool during your PDF editing process

• Personal Signature Integration

Depending on the industry you work in and the profession you choose, you may require digital signatures in the files you upload to your clients. However, given the digital nature of PDF files, it can be extremely difficult to manually sign each document without relying on image manipulation (which some clients may consider illicit). 

Thus, a good PDF editor should come equipped with signature functionality which will allow for seamless and monetary creation of custom signatures from the comfort of your home or office. Effectively, you can combine the created signature with written content created via tools such as Best Essay Education and Readable and in doing so complete your PDFs content and prepare it for upload more quickly.

• Custom Form Creation

Creating a highly versatile and performance-oriented environment to work in is high on the list of priorities for both businesses and freelancers. Thus, creating custom forms and documents ready to be filled out and submitted to different clients and departments becomes a necessity. 

Given that custom forms represent a very sought-after quality of life feature, good PDF editors should allow for such functionality to their users. Choosing to integrate such an editor into your workflow will undoubtedly increase your overall productivity and end-product quality since you will be able to fully customize and prepare forms for later use.

• 24/7 Availability and Assistance

Lastly, while you may have a good handle on your PDF editor’s functionality at the moment, you may want to move on to more advanced features and techniques down the line. Editors which are abandoned shortly after they launch on the market will fail to meet your criteria and leave you without developer support or further updates.

As such, it’s important that you can get in touch with the PDF editor’s managerial or customer support staff in some form and establish meaningful communication. Whether through chatbot messages, email, messenger functionality or other forms of communication, a good PDF editor should have a reliable and professional staff behind it 24/7.

In Summary

While it may seem impossible to find an editor with a feature list as extensive as the ones we’ve discussed so far, such tools are already readily available. Finding a PDF editor with the combination of the above-mentioned advantages and features should enable you to adapt to any number of personal or professional situations you come across.

Bio: Nicole D. Garrison is a content strategist, writer, and contributor at a number of platforms for marketing specialists such as Supreme Dissertations and Grab My Essay. She is a dedicated and experienced author who pays particular attention to quality research. In her free time, Nicole is a passionate runner and a curious beekeeper. Moreover, she runs her own blog LiveInspiredMagazine.

Lisa Bowlin Staff Writer

Lisa Bowlin is a staff writer at WorkSimpli. Her background in Business Operations motivates her to improve access to legal advice in underserved groups, especially in areas like business formation...