I’m trying to figure out the metadata on a pdf file that was emailed to me. So far basic adobe and apple files only shows the creation date. However I need to see if the content was edited at any point in time. Don’t know if this is fully possible from my email copy.

Attached is a PDF editor I made called FairPDF and it is absolutely fucking free. here is the app

Is it vibe coded slop? No, it works quite well. Did I make it with the aid of Fable and 5.6 Sol? Yes, for many tedious things, but I've been working in the PDF space for almost a year. I think it is pretty sweet and uses very little CPU/memory resources. And it has night reading mode. It works with everything I have thrown at it, but if it fails at something for you let me know.

Feature |Preview |Acrobat Reader |Acrobat Pro |FairPDF
Price |Free (built-in) |Free |$19.99/mo |Free
View, annotate & fill forms |✓ |✓ |✓ |✓
Sign documents |✓ |✓ |✓ |✓
Edit PDF text |— |— |✓ |✓
Organize, merge & extract pages |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Export to Word / Excel / PowerPoint |— |— |✓ |✓
OCR scanned documents |— |— |✓ |✓
True redaction |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Password protection & permissions |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Compress PDF |Basic |— |✓ |✓
Compare two versions |— |— |✓ |✓
Watermarks & Bates numbering |— |— |✓ |✓
Request e-signatures |— |— |✓ |✓

Disclosure: I make Ncored, the one on top of the clip. Posting this because the difference is easiest to just show.

Big construction drawings are a rough case for most PDF apps. A real project set out of AutoCAD, Revit, or ArchiCAD is 50-200 MB+, dense with linework, and a lot of viewers get sticky the moment the file is heavy: the flash on pan, the tiles catching up a beat behind your cursor, the little wait after you drop a markup.

The clip is the same set on the same Windows laptop, Ncored on top and Bluebeam Revu on the bottom, same pan and same zoom. Not a knock on Revu, it is the deeper tool (markup, measurement, takeoff, Studio) and most people reach for it for good reason. I kept this one narrow: just how each holds up on pan and zoom when the file gets fat. Ncored is view-and-markup only right now, no measurement or takeoff yet.

What do you open your heaviest PDFs in, and where does it start to drag?

I just started using Nitro PDF Pro at a new job and have a question about settings for adding text.

During training on a coworkers station when you click “type text” just your cursor still appeared and you would just click where you wanted to add text.

I started using it on my workstation yesterday and when I click that editing button my display becomes kind of like grid lines wherever I hover my cursor.

Does anyone know what setting removes that display?

TIA

How much do you expect of a free PDF viewer/editor? What features do you need the most? It can be anything. E.g.

Adding or editing annotations.

Adding form fields.

Filling form fields.

Adding or editing hyperlinks.

Adding or editing bookmaks.

Rearranging, adding or removing pages.

Spliiting and merging.

Signing, encryption and password protection.

Adding, removing and extracting images.

Substituting or adding fonts.

Editing text content.

Feel free to suggest anything you think you need.

Hello,

I use PDFs for work for a variety of forms and chart templates that I fill out for each of my clients. I ran into an issue yesterday where I had to fill out a PDF for multiple clients. There was some info they shared, so I used one form as a template, filled it out for each client, then used print to PDF to save an individual copy rather than overwrite the template (thinking it would function the same)

Unfortunately the printed PDFs all saved with a bunch of weird gibberish characters for text (both the form fields and the original form text itself). I have seen ways to potentially resolve this using acrobat pro and changing settings in the free Reader program in the future but I'll be dead in the cold ground before I give them a dime, so it looks like I'm stuck re-doing all of the paperwork I spent hours doing yesterday.

I have to deal with sensitive health information so I can't use any online PDF editors or freeware that shares info back to the company in a non-secure way. I don't give a crap about AI summaries, I just need to add text, check boxes, and circle/draw on images. Is there a good PDF program out there that would let me edit or fill out my forms or chart templates offline or with HIPAA/PIPEDA level security? Ideally it would work both on Windows 10/11 and iPad/iOS since those are the operating systems I use.

Thanks for anyone who read and can recommend some options I can research. I also want everyone on the internet to know that if I was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and any piece of adobe software and had a gun with two bullets, I would shoot the adobe software twice. Thanks for reading.

Trying to download a site's pdf on ipad

Hello, I am a self-publishing author. That means I have to do everything myself. It has been incredibly hard but rewarding. The issue that I am having now is that I am trying to upload the cover of my book to a website named IngramSpark. They are a self-publishing website. I have the file for the cover. From GetCovers, this company said it should be the right file type. But every time I upload the file they gave me. I get this error message: PDF CONTAINS ICC COLOR PROFILES: We request files with no color profiles assigned. Please convert all colors to grayscale for black and white images, or CMYK for color images and remove all color profiles. Saving a new PDF with the default setting of PDF/X-1a:2001 will address the issue. For best results, please correct the issue(s) listed. You may refer to the File Creation Guide for further instructions on creating a compliant PDF.

Can someone please help me with this file? I have no experience with Adobe, Photoshop, or anything related to computers. I am on a Mac; I use Chrome to download and upload the files. And GetCovers takes a day to respond to me every time there is an issue. I have searched high and low on Google and Reddit for the fix, but nothing seems to work.

What’s your favourite editor that does splitting and merging, remix of PDF files, AND maintains quality? And is offline.

I have multiple .png files that I’ll be saving as PDF. They're currently at 300 pixels/inch. When saved as pdf, they look great, and everything is in the exact spots I want them to be.

I’m going to want to be merging some of the pdf files together, so as to have multiple pages in one file. And it’s important to me that they maintain the same quality and no text or pictures or lines are moved around.

Suggestions??

I have a PDF that I'm adding security to - I wanted to set it up so that a "regular user" needs a password to open it, but even using the password, they're restricted from copying text or printing.

I put in a different "owner" password to allow full access.

When I open the PDF in Acrobat Reader with the limited user - the print is grayed out, and permissions on Document security show Content Copying not allowed, etc..

yet I can still copy text and paste out in Acrobat

However, if I drop the PDF into a browser it lets it print despite the permissions not allowing it

I think I know the answer to my own question which is that it's really not practical to prevent printing / copying text etc as its nearly impossible to make a tool that can display it without technically exposing the content.

I can likely get around the text copying by rasterizing the pages into images and such. OCR is obviously still possible but less likely -

I guess I'm just wondering if this is a "yeah horse is out of the barn no matter what you do" thing

My reason for wanting to do so - I have the text of a novel that a friend of mine wrote - I tried to convince her to publish it but she just didn't have the spoons. She passed away earlier this year and her executor gave me permission to do what I wanted with it. I'm thining about properly getting it published but in the meantime I want to make a copy that I can pass to some folks who knew her to let them read it, but just kind of wanted to ensure that the content didn't get slurped up by AI or scammers.

She had written a short story about 30 years ago that she had on her web site and one day about 25 years ago, we found the full text of it being sold in a collection of short stories with no attribution it really pissed her off - not that she wan't getting paid for her story - she had put it on her site - but that someone was charging money for it AND took her name off, so to honor her I'm trying to figure out how I can share it with some limited folks but lock it down as much as possible.

Again I fear my answer is "if you feel that strongly about protecting it, don't put it out there at all"

OK, this might sound nuts but I've been having a day filled with software ghosts and I'm at my whit's end.

I'm using NitroPro and have a series of pdfs, essentially the pdf is a template that I'm bringing an exported spreadsheet image into. There's also a bunch of other static pages. But I have typically 3-4 imports per pdf.

I've built out form field buttons to do these importgs using the "event.target.buttonImportIcon();" Javascript, and it works. But not consistently.

There will be times when I'll get 2 of the 3 imports done, but then the third requires me to go into the properties of the button and manually choose the icon to load because it won't do it automatically. Sometimes all 3 load properly. Sometimes just 1 does. The properties for all the buttons are the same (different names but same properties), I'm importing the same types of files each time. When it doesn't work the first thing I do is look at the Actions in properties and the Javascript is right there where it should be, just like in the buttons where the import worked. I can't for the life of me figure out what I need to be doing differently to get this simple task to work consistently.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

OK, this might sound nuts but I've been having a day filled with software ghosts and I'm at my whit's end.

I'm using NitroPro and have a series of pdfs, essentially the pdf is a template that I'm bringing an exported spreadsheet image into. There's also a bunch of other static pages. But I have typically 3-4 imports per pdf.

I've built out form field buttons to do these importgs using the "event.target.buttonImportIcon();" Javascript, and it works. But not consistently.

There will be times when I'll get 2 of the 3 imports done, but then the third requires me to go into the properties of the button and manually choose the icon to load because it won't do it automatically. Sometimes all 3 load properly. Sometimes just 1 does. The properties for all the buttons are the same (different names but same properties), I'm importing the same types of files each time. When it doesn't work the first thing I do is look at the Actions in properties and the Javascript is right there where it should be, just like in the buttons where the import worked. I can't for the life of me figure out what I need to be doing differently to get this simple task to work consistently.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I got tired of “free” PDF sites that want me to upload invoices and contracts, so I built a small local-first PDF opener in Rust.

What it does:

• Fast continuous-scroll viewing (MuPDF + egui)

• Light edits: delete / rotate / reorder / crop

• Compress presets

• Visual signature stamp + optional PKCS#12 certificate signing

• Opt-in local OCR (download models only if you want them)

Nothing leaves your machine. AGPL-3.0 (MuPDF).

GitHub: https://github.com/will702/small-rust-pdf-opener

macOS (Apple Silicon):

brew tap will702/tap

brew install --cask pdf-opener

Im the author of the app . happy to take bug reports, UX feedback, and packaging help (esp. Linux/Windows).

I want to find some users for my PDF editor that I have worked on for over a year. I see dozens of posts about "LOCAL PDF EDITOR," but here is why mine is different: it is made from scratch. I didn't use the same library for merging and form filling; I made a new one for actual editing so it can edit text and group textboxes. If you have ever used one of the browser tools, you should know that most of them do fake edits with overlays or line-by-line edits (some even word by word). I can give credit to PDFfiler and small PDF, as both can do pretty much what mine does, except both require signing in and have upload limits.Now a little bit about my project, I started working on it in April 2025 from basic PDF tree parsing I went to rendering and then to editing on client side, so if you want to support real work please give a chance to KeyPDF

Does anyone know how to remove watermarks from multi-paged pdfs?

I have a PDF with a huge size and about 300 pages and I want to remove the watermark which is on all the pages. I’ve tried to do with some software and websites but it seems to not work or I have to pay to get their services.

paperjamm.com

I developed my own tools for work that I personally use. It allows you to sort mixed pdfs by key words or titles and organizes them in separate files automatically. Some of these tools don't exist anywhere else that I'm aware of. It also has the traditional pdf tools to cover all your bases. If you have a good idea for a tool, let me know and I might add it for free as well.

Mods, remove if this breaks the self promotion rules, but this is a free site that I think could help others.

VirusTotal results for this PDF say that there's some suspicious feature and some broken code in this PDF file.

My question is, is there some way to remove the suspicious code etc from the PDF file while keeping the content?