Free Online PDF Service? Better Read The Small Print

My grandfather used to say:

"there is no such thing as a free lunch".

Why then is it that when I search the internet for PDF processing tools, there is a multitude of websites offering their PDF processing services for "free"?

Well, as always, the devil is in the details. Or in this case, the small print.

When I read the terms and conditions of some of the "free" online PDF processing websites, I was flat out flabbergasted by what I saw.

It seems that most of these services are banking on you not reading their terms! Take this example below from a website offering "FREE" PDF processing that shall remain nameless:

"Confidential information

Company does not want to receive confidential or proprietary information from you through our Web site. Please note that any information or material sent to Company will be deemed NOT to be confidential. By sending Company any information or material, you grant Company an unrestricted, irrevocable license to copy, reproduce, publish, upload, post, transmit, distribute, publicly display, perform, modify, create derivative works from, and otherwise freely use, those materials or information. You also agree that Company is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send us for any purpose. However, we will not release your name or otherwise publicize the fact that you submitted materials or other information to us unless: (a) we obtain your permission to use your name; or (b) we first notify you that the materials or other information you submit to a particular part of this site will be published or otherwise used with your name on it; or (c) we are required to do so by law. Personally-identifiable information that you submit to Company for the purpose of receiving products or services will be handled in accordance with our privacy policies. Please see the tab entitled "Privacy" for information regarding Company's privacy policies. "

HOLLY CRAP!!

Its right there in black and white; by using their free service, you are granting them, and we quote, "unrestricted, irrevocable license to copy, reproduce, publish, upload, post, transmit, distribute, publicly display, perform, modify, create derivative works from, and otherwise freely use" your PDF documents.

And thats not all folks! They also state that whenever you upload your private PDF files to their service, you grant them free reigns to "use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send us for any purpose".

To put this into practical terms, it means that whenever you upload your PDF file to this free service, you are handing over the rights to the contents in the PDF document. It could be plans to your house, a form you have created, your resumè; what ever it is, once uploaded to these free PDF services, it no longer belongs to you.

This, folks, is a the price of FREE. And it is not ok.

Even though we have our own free online PDF processing service that you can use to merge, split, compress and convert your files (https://allaboutpdf.com/allaboutpdf-online/), its primary purpose is to serve as a quick demo for our full windows application that allows you to process PDF documents locally and privately. We don't ever read or analyze the uploaded PDF documents and our API deletes ALL PDFs files that are uploaded within 60 minutes of being processed.

The lesson here is that if you are not paying money for a service, read the small print to make sure that you are not inadverntly paying for it with your valuable data.

How To Prevent a PDF From Being Edited

PDF documents are by far the best way to share all kinds of documents all over the internet. A very common use for PDF documents is to upload your resumè and cover letters to job sites. Another use to create document templates that can be sold online.

What makes PDFs so useful for sharing is that they can be opened on virtually any operating system using a variety of free and paid software. With PDF, you can be assured that the document will look exactly the way you intended it to look regardless of the software used to open it.

There are however some instances where you don't your shared document to be modified by any viewer. For example, if you send a resumè to a recruiter, you want to be sure that your details are not modified without your consent. When you create a document online for monetization, you don't other people to easily download and use it without paying you for your hard-work.

What can you do to make PDF not editable?

The answer is to set PDF permissions on the PDF document before you share it.

A PDF document can contain 2 passwords; a User password and an Owner password. By adding an Owner password, you can specify what the viewer can and cannot do with your PDF document. When a PDF only has an Owner password, it can still be opened and viewed without a password prompt. The permissions that you can set on a PDF include:

• allow/disallow printing

• allow/disallow copying of contents

• allow/disallow editing/modifying of contents

• allow/disallow editing/modifying of annotations

• allow/disallow form filling

• allow/disallow screen readers

With All-About-PDF, setting permissions on your PDF files is straight forward:

1. Open All-About-PDF and click on the "Protect" button

2. In the Window that opens, select the PDF file that you would like to set permissions on

3. Leave the User password blank (unless you want to restrict opening of the document with a password)

4. Set the Owner password to a strong password

5. Select the permissions that you would like to set on the document

6. Hit the "GO" button to set the permissions.

7. The protected PDF will be saved in the same folder as the original document with "protected" added to the file name.

Whenever the document is opened, the viewer will be restricted to just the permissions you set. Get started by downloading All-About-PDF now.

For further document protection, you can also use All-About-PDF to add image or text watermark to the PDF file.

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 Organize and Protect Your Tax Documents

Its the new year and before you know it, it will once again be tax season in America. I don't know about you but to me, tax season basically means having to scan and send documents such as mortgage statements, W2s, insurance statements, business income statements etc etc to my accountants and then they work their magic and send back more PDFs in return. This happens every year so by the end of each tax season, I add more and more documents to my Tax Documents archive.

As you know, keeping your archive of tax documents organized is very important as they are almost always required for transactions of a financial nature. In this post, I am going to share with you how I organize my tax documents after each tax season is over.

Step 1: Store Your Tax Archive in the Cloud

If you don't have one already, sign up with a cloud file storage service such as Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive. Having your tax archive stored in the cloud is great because you can access it from virtually anywhere with an internet connection and you will not lose it should your computer hard drive fail.

Step 2: Create a Folder For Each Tax Year

This one is self-explanatory; in the cloud account, create a folder for each tax year e.g. 2017, 2018, 2019 and so on.

Step 3: Merge All Your PDF Files

The goal here is to end up with a total of 2 PDF files for each tax year.

Merge all the supporting PDF files together into a single PDF (this is the stuff you send to your accountant in order for them to file your taxes) and then merge all the documents your accountant sends back to you into another PDF. You should name the files accordingly.

Step 4: Compress Your PDF Files

Once your PDFs are merged, you will likely notice that the size of the resulting document is fairly large. This is especially true if your supporting documents were scanned in.

Since neither bandwidth nor storage space is free, compress your PDF files to reduce them in size so that they are easier to store and share. You can carry out this step prior to step 3 and achieve the same result.

Step 5: Password Protect Your PDF Documents

Some of you may have been hesitant about the rest of the advice here when the first step was to store your private tax documents in the cloud. And rightly so; with the way the world is going, its more a matter of when and not if, they get hacked.

You definitely don't want the bad guys to have full access to all that private data.

This is reason we have the final step in organizing your tax documents is to protect your PDF documents with a strong password. Once your PDF documents are password protected, only the person with the password can open and view their contents.

For tips on creating strong passwords, check out this LifeHacker article.

Tip: once you have created your strong PDF password, be sure to save it in a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password in case you ever forget it.

Get started with organizing and protecting your tax documents by downloading All-About-PDF today.

How to Compress A PDF Files

PDF documents are great in that, as they are completely self-contained, they can be easily shared and viewed on just about any operating system and hardware. As PDF files embed all images, fonts and other styling into the document itself, they can quickly become large files especially when dealing with scanned files. In fact, a scanned PDF document at 300dpi averages between 7MB and 12MB in size per page. This size can become unwieldy and make it difficult to work with and share.

All-About-PDF can compress your scanned PDF files by over 7000%

All-About-PDF comes with a feature that enables to tackle this challenge by compressing PDF documents and making them smaller in size.

The video below shows how to compress a PDF document in All-About-PDF and reduce its size from 12MB to just 154KB (over 7000% smaller).

You can compress a PDF document with All-About-PDF in just 3 steps

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

2. Click the “Compress” button

3. Select the PDF document that you would like compressed and provide the PDF password if it is password protected

4. Select the compression settings and specify the image quality setting. The lower the image quality, the smaller the resulting file will be

5. Hit the “Go” button to compress the file. The resulting file will be saved as [filename]_compressed.pdf in the same folder as the original file.

To see how much All-About-PDF can compress your PDF documents by, download the trial today from the link below:

How to Convert a PDF to Word

We can agree that the PDF document format is superior when it comes to packaging and sharing rich documents. There are however times when you need to convert a PDF into a Microsoft Word document in order to edit the text or share it with other people that prefer the DOC format.

With All-About-PDF, it is very easy and fast to convert a PDF to Word document.

1. If you havent already, download and install All-About-PDF from here

2. Once installed, launch the application and select the “Convert” card

3. You can select one or more PDF files to convert to MS Word

4. Hit the MS Word button to begin converting all the selected PDF files to MS Word

Thats all it takes to convert PDF files to the Microsoft Word format.

Go ahead and give it a try by downloading the free trial from here

What is a PDF Anyway?

First Some History

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. The format was created by Adobe, in the early 1990s, as a way to completely store a document in one file. At first, the PDF format was mainly used for desktop publishing of documents for print. Companies used PDFs to save posters, flyers, and other similar types of files for physical printing.

The PDF format was not always as popular as it is now was it was controlled by Adobe. In fact, Microsoft Word was the defacto document sharing format. Things however started to change in 2008 when Adobe dropped this ownership of the format and PDF became an open standard. PDFs still have a basic set of properties, but these are independent of Adobe. 

Why is PDF better?

The reason PDF was such a revolution when it arrived, is becuase at the time, professional software that was used to create graphics and documents resulted in unbearably large files, especially when they had pictures, fonts, and other graphical elements embedded. They also required a lot of processing power to produce.

The PDF format changed this as Adobe found a way to gather all the parts of a file and make it into a smaller whole.

The portable in PDF is significant: The format is platform agnostic and therefore PDFs look the same no matter what device they’re viewed on. Whether you’re using Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, or even Windows XP — on any software and hardware, PDFs stay consistent. The data contained in a PDF is not dependent on the creator’s or the viewer’s device. Including fonts, pictures, charts, and the like is no struggle for a PDF.

Compared to other documents formats such as Microsoft Word, what happens if your recipient doesn’t have Microsoft Word on their computer? Sure, they could open it in Google Docs or Apple Pages, but it might look a lot different since they all render files differently. If you spent a lot of time getting tables, images, and other elements just right, it might all go out the window. And what if they try to open the Word document on their phone?

In addition to the portability described above, PDFs have several other features that have contributed to their continued popularity.

For one, PDFs allow for fine-tuned security settings. When you create a PDF, you can disable viewers’ ability to print the document, leave comments on it, or copy its text. You can even password protect PDF files. Thus, when governments and businesses put forms online, they can heavily restrict them to prevent abuse. 

The Missing Piece

While its easy to view PDFs files on virtually any platform, the same can't be said when it comes to manipulating them. If you need to merge PDF files together, split them or remove pages, you usually have to buy expensive software to handle the task or upload to untrusted third party server online.

Until now.

We have created All-About-PDF to help you manipulate PDFs at a reasonable cost without the need to upload your files to a third-party server or paying a monthly fee. 

Give All-About-PDf a try buy downloading the trial now.

How to Merge PDF Files

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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.