The Benefits of Converting Images into a PDF

PDF was designed to be a universal, easy-to-read document format, and it serves that purpose well if you have a collection of images that you need to share.

1. Easy to Share and Read
   PDF is particularly useful if you have a collection of images–say, documents you scanned into your computer as JPEGs. By converting and combining them into a single PDF file is a great way to share and help users read your document. No one has to shuffle through a series of JPEGs to read your document.
2. Reduce file size
   As digital camera technology improves, image resolution grows, making picture files larger. Most email applications have a size limit for attachments, which sometimes leaves you sending email messages with subjects reading "Vacation Photo #33." Converting your photos into PDFs can drastically reduce the size of your file so that you can send them all at once with ease.
3. Create Beautiful Photo Album
   When you want to share your photos, you can use free services such as Canva and tools that you may already have, such as PowerPoint, to decorate your photos and make digital photo albums. If you need professional, book-store quality PDF photo album, try online services like Blurb.

How to Edit PDF files

If you regularly send and receive PDF documents, this time-saving guide is for you.

What is PDF and why is it hard to modify?

PDF (Portable Document Format), is a type of digital document that looks like a printed document and can be viewed, printed, and electronically transmitted regardless of what software they use to view the file. Because it's designed to look and behave like a printed document, PDF can't easily be modified. But with right tools, it's doable.

Here are three ways to edit PDF document, on a Mac or Windows computer.

1. Using Adobe Acrobat Software (for both Mac and Windows)

Acrobat is the most popular tool in the market to work with PDF documents. However, not every version of Acrobat allows you to edit existing text once you open your document in the program.

Adobe categorizes its software under Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro. There are three editions in both product lines: Acrobat X, Acrobat XI, and Acrobat DC.

According to Adobe, the editions below allow for basic text and content editing, as well as the ability to export your document into Microsoft Word:

• Acrobat XI Standard
• Acrobat XI Pro
• Acrobat Standard DC
• Acrobat Pro DC

Acrobat Pro DC and Acrobat Standard DC offer a host of other editing capabilities that Acrobat XI does not offer, such as automatic spell-check, advanced photo editing, and editing from an iPad.

Once you install Acrobat, 

1. Open the software.
2. Go to File > Open … and select your PDF file.
3. After your file opens, select "Edit PDF" in the right-hand toolbar.
4. To edit text, first place your cursor on the text you'd like to edit.
5. Edit your text using the "Format" options at the top of the right-hand toolbar.

For more information, visit the Official Acrobat's How-To page.

2. Using Acrobat-Alternative Software

PDFelement (for Mac and Windows)

PDFelement is a downloadable program to edit PDF documents, including text, images, pages, links, backgrounds, watermarks, headers and footers. It comes in two flavor, the standard and the Pro versions. The Pro version comes with optical character recognition (OCR) if you need to work with PDF that contains scanned pages. The ability to create complex PDF forms from paper forms or other documents is a huge plus. So is the ability to convert a PDF to Word or Excel format.

PDF Expert (for Mac)

PDF Expert is a downloadable program built for Macs that allows you to open and edit PDF content right from the original PDF. While PDF Expert is easy to use, it's a little less capable compared to Acrobat, and the app is not able to provide optical character recognition (OCR) on scanned documents. Adobe Acrobat Pro or PDFelement will better meet your needs.

3. Using Free Online Tools

The hassle of needing an expensive program like Adobe to edit such a common file type hasn't gone unnoticed, and there are numerous online tools you can now use for free to edit your PDF. Because they are online, they work on all computers - no matter if you use Mac or Windows.

Sejda

Sejda is an online service that allows for a decent range of document management functions. It covers the standard tasks like merging and splitting documents, converting to a variety of formats, editing, page numbering, and some light security features. The PDF editing function allows you to rotate, compress, crop and extract text from your documents with ease. It also converts PDF to Word and Excel formats as well.

SmallPDF

SmallPDF is a simple and comprehensive online PDF tools. Its offer up to 16 type of operations you can choose from, including adding text and image annotation and converting PDF back to Word for full document editing. The free version only allows for 2 tasks per hour and one PDF conversion to other formats per day.

Advanced PDF editors like Acrobat can be expensive and difficult to use. It includes so many features that you need to do a course to learn how to use them effectively. The alternatives share many of the same features, but not the complexity. And it makes editing PDFs simple.

An Easy Way To Streamline Your Document Workflow

Often times multiple documents are more conveniently viewed as a single document. But different document formats don't play nice to each other and manually merging them can be a stressful task. Thankfully, there is a free online tool that can save you from a lot of headache.

easyPDF Cloud is an online PDF tool that allows you to create workflows to automatically perform a series of PDF operations. The operations are not limited to creating and merging PDFs. You can also rotate, delete, extract, watermark PDF pages and convert PDF to other formats such as Words and Excel.

Once a workflow is created, all you need to do is to drag-and-drop your documents for processing. The following video will show you how it's done.

How to Build PDF Features for Your Web Applications

If you need to quickly build PDF features for your web or mobile application, this guide is for you.

First, build out the feature. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a free account and sign-in to easypdfcloud.com. Then select "Create Workflow."
   
   
2. From under "Convert Files", select what document format you want to create from.
3. Then from under "Edit PDF Files," select how you want to edit or process your document.
4. Finally, give your PDF workflow a name and click "Done". This new workflow will appear whenever you login to easyPDFcloud. Just drop a file in there to test it out.
   
   
   
   
   

Now that the workflow is done, you can start integrating it into your web/mobile applications using the RESTful calling style by following these instructions.

Add PDF Features to Your Dropbox Folder

easyPDF Cloud works with Dropbox, allowing you to convert and configure documents straight in your Dropbox folder. You can convert your files simply by dropping them into a Dropbox folder.

Setting up Dropbox Folder Monitoring is easy (Watch the Video).

First, create a conversion workflow with Dropbox input and just turn the “Monitor this folder for new files every 5 minutes” button to Yes.

Once you’ve finished your workflow, simply press “Done” on the workflow edit page & “Run” on your workflow and you will see this...

… from that point on, any file you place in specified Dropbox input folder will go through the workflow and appear in the specified output folder (Watch the Video). Sending someone a PDF document when you have Word, Excel, Powerpoint or even a webpage, is as simple as dropping the file into your dropbox folder. You don’t have to be on easyPDF Cloud, you don’t have to manually Run the workflow; you just have to drag and drop files to your Dropbox folder.

PDF Conversion API For Linux and OS X Machines

BCL's PDF Conversion programming interface (API) now runs on Linux, enabling Linux and Mac OS X developers to convert PDF to Word/Excel and HTML formats from on-premise software and software-as-a-service.

Explore the Getting Started Manual and Sample Code for more information.

Create, Convert, and Merge PDF Files from Virtually Anywhere

Easily create, convert, and merge PDF from virtually anywhere, and it has never been this easy. With the new interface, you can drag-and-drop your files to convert to PDF, to convert PDF to Word, and to combine multiple documents into a PDF. Because it's 100% cloud solution, there is no software to download and you always have access to high quality document conversion from virtually anywhere. Try it now.  And if you sign up for a free account, you can permanently store your converted documents in our cloud storage.