Open PDF File

PDF Tools

In this article we will review common tools used for PDF creation, processing and editing.

Apache PDFBox is a Java library which provides rich functionality for working with PDF documents. With just several lines of Java code PDFBox is able to create a PDF and add content to it. Besides PDF creation PDFBox provides text extraction tools and functions. PDF text extraction could be very helpful when you need to search through a large collection of PDF documents.

An important benefit of PDFBox is that it provides an integration with Lucene – open source full text search library. Together with Lucene, PDFBox allows developer to quickly build searchable repository of PDF documents. Other important features of PDFBox are PDF encryption, working with default 14 PDF fonts, embedding custom fonts into PDF and working with AcroForms. PDFBox documentation is available at https://pdfbox.apache.org/1.8/faq.html.

QPDF is a great little tool which allows quick processing of PDF file and outputting the same file but with modifications applied. For example it allows to decompress all compressed content within PDF file to make it more readable for developer. It also allows splitting and merging of PDF files. Developers use QPDF for PDF files inspection and checking. QPDF could be downloaded from http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/.

SmallPDF.com is a great collection of PDF tools available online. It has tools for all kind of operations with PDF including conversions to and from PDF, PDF compression, PDF editing, PDF merging, PDF splitting, eSigning PDF, PDF rotation and many more.

NitroPDF is a free to try suite which supports many operations on PDF files including editing, creating, merging, eSigning, creating PDF forms, PDF conversion.