Nearly 32 years since it first arrived on the scene, the humble PDF is still going strong, and remains one of the most popular and widely used file formats. With a host of different benefits, ranging from platform independence to consistent formatting, compressibility, and more, PDF documents are pretty much a staple for official documentation across business, government, and education.

No matter what line of work you are in, or what your job entails, working with PDFs is pretty much the norm. Despite its wide popularity and varied use cases, however, a vast majority of users fail to utilize, or even understand the tremendous capabilities this file format provides. When done right, power users of the PDF file format can see significant efficiency and productivity gains.

Adobe’s Portable Document Format or PDF has undergone tremendous transformations over the years, and has effectively birthed a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of apps, tools, plugins, and integrations. The right use of these services can unlock substantial value, and in this article we uncover some tried-and-tested tips, tricks, and best practices in order to achieve the same.

1. Use Online Tools

There are 1,000s of free online tools that make it a breeze to work with PDF files. Whether it is for editing, converting, creating, or distributing, web apps give desktop solutions a run for their money, especially in recent years.

These tools offer a great deal of versatility and customizability, something that desktop apps have gotten increasingly poor at. 

Tools such as PDFSimpli provide a wide range of services, ranging from simply converting Word documents, spreadsheets, and jpegs into PDFs, or vice versa, to the ability to consolidate multiple PDFs and edit them as one, essentially turning PDF files into swiss army knives, fit for a broad spectrum of use cases.

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2. Choose The Right PDF Reader

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader still remains the most popular choice for PDF readers, but there are a number of better alternatives, providing a more fluid experience for users while reading or working with PDF files. FoxIt Reader, Wondershare PDFelement, and Sumatra PDF are a few well known alternatives to try out.

The thing about PDF readers is that there are a few options where the yearly license fees can go all the way up to $1,000, and there are others that are 100% free, with little-to-no differences in their offerings. 

Almost all of the above-mentioned readers offer a free basic version, which is perfectly fine for simple use-cases such as reading, sharing, or archiving of files. For more sophisticated requirements such as optical character recognition, or paperless offices, and digital signatures, a premium plan is warranted.

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3. Protect Your Files 

Security has long been one of the biggest selling points of PDF file formats ever since it was first introduced in the early-90s. 

Even today, PDF documents are paramount when it comes to security offerings, with the ability to encrypt files, password protect them, and institute digital signatures to prevent any and all unauthorized access.

Digital signatures, watermarks, and digital rights management are few of the other security features that make PDFs perfect for data integrity, records storage, and archiving. Entire organizational systems, processes, and frameworks can be built on the humble PDF. You can also take it a step further and convert your PDF to link, which will add another layer of security.

4. Use Highlights & Bookmarks

Long, drawn out documents can be quite tedious to get through, even for the right audiences, fortunately, many PDF creators come with extensive features that can enliven and make documents an engaging read.

While highlighting and bookmarks are the basic features that can aid in this regard, professional PDF editing tools provide a much more intuitive and user-friendly editing interface, making it possible to structure, design, and format documents for maximum engagement and readability.

There are plenty of PDF templates that come in handy, with headers, titles, and formatting, all already in place, for users to just fill in the text, and get started. As is the case with all documents, the key to make it readable, is to make it skimmable, which is where highlights, bookmarks, and visuals come in handy.

5. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The most useful feature of many PDF readers is optical character recognition or OCR, which extracts texts and other data from PDF files, making them scannable, searchable, and editable at the click of a button.

OCR was once a ground-breaking advance in AI and computer vision technology a decade ago that allowed for the scanning of texts and characters across JPEG files, TIFFs, and more. Today, however, it is nothing out of the ordinary, often palling in-front of the latest advances in AI, but on the other hand, it converts PDF characters into texts with a high degree of accuracy.

Here again, Adobe Acrobat Reader is far from being the best OCR solution for PDFs, with tools the likes of DocuSumo, and Abbyy FineReader beating it to the chase.

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6. Make Your PDF Accessible

When dealing with large records of PDF documents, accessibility is crucial to ensure discoverability, and searchability. There are ways of ensuring that your PDF document has the right attributes to ensure the same.

The steps in this regard is to add text to your document, which is easily recognizable by most search functions. Make sure to run it through OCR to make the text recognizable characters. Following this, make sure to provide a proper structure for your document, with headers, sub-headers, and sub-sub-headers.

If the document contains extensive visuals, graphics, and images, make sure they are tagged with alternative text, or alt-tags. All of this can be done fairly easily using Adobe Acrobat’s Accessibility Wizard, or a similar option with most other premium PDF editing tools.

Final Words

Since the early-1990s, PDFs have played a critical role in ushering in the era of paperless offices, digital transformations, and digitalization. Over the coming years, this file format will continue to dominate personal, business, and academic use cases, creating substantial value and unlocking efficiency gains in the process.

PDF documents now work in conjunction with a broad multi-billion dollar ecosystem of apps, tools, and services, which have since expanded the possibilities that come with this file format. For amateurs, enthusiasts, and power users alike, the future is exciting, with plenty of new AI and ML capabilities making their way into this ecosystem.

This article was provided by José Luis Martín Cara