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software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

used to manage

Portable Document Format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating syste ...

(PDF) documents. The distinction between the various functions is not entirely clear-cut; for example, some viewers allow adding of annotations, signatures, etc. Some software allows redaction, removing content irreversibly for security. Extracting embedded text is a common feature, but other applications perform

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

(OCR) to convert imaged text to machine-readable form, sometimes by using an external OCR module.

Terminology

*''Creators'' – to allow users to convert other file formats to PDF. *''Readers'' – to allow users to open, read and print PDF files. *''Editors'' – to allow users to edit or otherwise modify PDF files. *''Converters'' – to allow users to convert PDF files to other formats.

Multi-platform

Development libraries

These are used by software developers to add and create PDF features.

Creators

These create files in their native formats, but then allow users to export them to PDF formats.

Viewers

These allow users to view (not edit or modify) any existing PDF file.

AmigaOS

Converters

Antiword Antiword is a free software reader for proprietary Microsoft Word documents, and is available for most computer platforms. Antiword can convert the documents from Microsoft Word version 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to plain text, PostScript, ...

: A free Microsoft Office Word reader for various operating systems; converts binary files from Word 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to plain text or PostScript; available for

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partne ...

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale dev ...

AROS Aros may refer to: *Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...

x86 * dvipdfm: a DVI to PDF translator with zlib support

Viewers

Xpdf Xpdf is a free and open-source PDF viewer for operating systems supported by the Qt toolkit. Versions prior to 4.00 were written for the X Window System and Motif. Functions Xpdf runs on nearly any Unix-like operating system. Binaries are a ...

: a multi-platform viewer for PDF files, Amiga version uses X11 engine

Cygnix Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin in ...

Linux and Unix

Converters

Collabora Online Collabora Online is an open source online office suite that can be integrated with any web application, it is developed by Collabora Productivity, a division of Collabora. Collabora Online has LibreOffice at its core and allows for collaborativ ...

can be used as a web application, a command line tool, or a Java/Python library. Supported formats include OpenDocument, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats (DOC/DOCX/RTF, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) and others.

Creators, Editors and Viewers

macOS

Converters

* deskUNPDF for Mac: proprietary application from Docudesk to convert PDF files to

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketi ...

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

, image, and data file formats

Creators

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

: Creates PDF documents natively via print dialog

Editors

* Adobe Acrobat: Proprietary PDF authoring suite * PDF Expert: Proprietary PDF viewer and editor. * PDF Studio: Proprietary software to view and edit PDF documents. * PDF Signer: Proprietary; fills forms and embeds image signatures in PDF documents

Viewers

* Safari: This bundled web browser has built-in support for reading PDF documents. *

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

: Includes a PDF viewer * Google Chrome: Includes a PDF viewer *

Preview Preview may refer to: Theatre, film, television * Preview (subscription service), an early subscription television service in the United States * Preview (theatre), a public performance of a theatrical show before the official opening * Previe ...

: macOS's default PDF viewer; in

Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in t ...

and later, it also can rotate, reorder, annotate, insert, and delete pages. It can also merge files, create new files from existing files, and move pages between files *

Adobe Reader Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage Portable Document Format (PDF) files. The family comprises Acrobat Reader (formerly Reader), Acrobat (former ...

: Adobe Systems's reader which is also available for Macintosh; Safari plug-in available * Skim, an open-source (BSD licence) PDF reader and note-taker for macOS *

Foxit Reader Foxit PDF Reader (formerly Foxit Reader) is a multilingual freemium PDF (Portable Document Format) tool that can create, view, edit, digitally sign, and print PDF files. Foxit Reader is developed by Fuzhou, China-based Foxit Software. Early ver ...

: Proprietary, freeware. Allows users to add elements to PDFs (e.g. arrowed comment boxes, text boxes, links, bookmarks, and images)

Microsoft Windows

Converters

* Adobe Acrobat: Can convert files into PDF or convert PDF files into other formats * ABBYY FineReader: Commercial PDF converter which converts PDF into Word (.doc), Excel (.xls), PowerPoint (ppt), and more * deskUNPDF: PDF converter to convert PDFs to Word (.doc, docx), Excel (.xls), (.csv), (.txt), more * GSview: File:Convert menu item converts any sequence of PDF pages to a sequence of images in many formats from bit to tiffpack with resolutions from 72 to 204 × 98 ( open source software) * Google Chrome: convert HTML to PDF using ''Print'' > ''Save as PDF''. * gDoc Fusion: Proprietary, shareware; PDF views, edits, converts documents into PDF, XPS or Microsoft Word document; after 30 days a watermark is placed on documents in shareware version *

OmniPage OmniPage is an optical character recognition (OCR) application available from Kofax Incorporated. OmniPage was one of the first OCR programs to run on personal computers. It was developed in the late 1980s and sold by Caere Corporation, a company ...

: Converts to and from PDF and other formats with many options. * Nitro PDF Reader: (

Freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

) Extracts Images in original resolution. *

PDF-XChange PDF-XChange Viewer is a freemium PDF reader for Microsoft Windows. It was available in a free and a paid version. Its further development has been stopped in favour of the freemium PDF-XChange Editor. It supports saving PDF forms (AcroForms), ...

: PDF Tools and PDF-XChange print driver allow conversion from many formats to PDF. A "lite" version of the print driver is free for non-commercial (home and academic) but places a watermark on documents *

Qiqqa Qiqqa (pronounced "Quicker") is a free and opensource software that allows researchers to work with thousands of PDFs. It combines PDF reference management tools, a citation manager, and a mind map brainstorming tool. It integrates with Microsoft ...

: Converts Microsoft Word document and Web Pages to PDF. * SWFTools: pdf2swf'' component converts PDF to SWF – command line with GUI wrapper * poppler-utils a collection of tools builds on poppler to convert PDF contents to everything *

GraphicsMagick GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick, emphasizing stability of both programming API and command-line options. It was branched off ImageMagick's version 5.5.2 in 2002 after irreconcilable differences emerged in the developers' group. In additi ...

: Can convert PDF to PNG or other formats.

Creators

Editors

Viewers

* ABBYY FineReader PDF Viewer *

: Adobe's PDF reader is free for personal use. *

Evince Evince (), also known as GNOME Document Viewer, is a free and open source document viewer supporting many document file formats including PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS and DVI. It is designed for the GNOME desktop environment. The develo ...

: a free (GPL), open source PDF reader. Part of the GNOME desktop environment. A Windows port was available from version 2.28 to version 2.32. *

: Proprietary/freeware PDF reader, supports FDF import/export, saving filled forms; other extended functionality available via purchasable plugins. * gDoc Fusion: Proprietary/shareware to view PDF, XPS, Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or image files, included in the evaluation version of the product. Shareware version places a watermark on documents after 30-day eval. * Google Chrome: Includes a PDF viewer. * GSview:

Open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

and

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...

's viewer for Windows. *

Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge is a proprietary, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. It was first released in 2015 as part of Windows 10 and Xbox One and later ported to other platforms as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project: Android ...

: Includes a PDF viewer. *

Microsoft Reader Microsoft Reader is a discontinued Microsoft application for reading e-books, first released in August 2000, that used its own .LIT format. It was available for Windows computers and Pocket PC PDAs. The name was also used later for an unrelated a ...

: A discontinued PDF viewer in Windows 8.1. * Mozilla Firefox: Includes a PDF viewer. *

MuPDF MuPDF is a free and open-source software framework written in C that implements a PDF, XPS, and EPUB parsing and rendering engine. It is used primarily to render pages into bitmaps, but also provides support for other operations such as sea ...

: Free lightweight document viewer. * Nitro PDF Reader: Freeware (though proprietary) PDF reader and creator. Supports three methods (specifying the file within the reader's interface, or dragging-'n-dropping a file onto the reader's Windows desktop icon, or "printing" to a virtual printer driver) of PDF creation (

not additionally needed), saving filled forms (AcroForms), text typewriter, markup/collaboration, and stamp signature (document signing). *

PDF-XChange Viewer PDF-XChange Viewer is a freemium PDF reader for Microsoft Windows. It was available in a free and a paid version. Its further development has been stopped in favour of the freemium PDF-XChange Editor. It supports saving PDF forms (AcroForms), ...

: Freeware viewer with free OCR, supports FDF/XFDF import/export, saving filled forms, extended markup and export to image capabilities. *

: Freeware PDF reader, indexer, tagger and annotator. Supports OCR and export of PDF text and images. * Sumatra PDF: A free (GPL), open source PDF reader based on MuPDF. It also supports DjVu, XPS, CHM, Comic Book (CBR, CBT, CBZ and CB7Z) and eBook (EPUB, FB2, FB2Z, PBD, MOBI, PBR, TCR & ZFB2), TXT and image file formats (.tga, .gif, .jpg, .j2k, .png, .webp, .tiff). Supports automatic .pdfsync & .synctex reloading of PDF files so is well favoured as a LaTeX / pdfTeX viewer with forward - inverse synchronization. Using Ghost script it supports PostScript (.ps, .eps) files. * STDU Viewer: A freeware for non-commercial usage PDF reader. It also supports DjVu, Comic Book Archive (CBR or CBZ), XPS, TIFF, TXT and image file formats. *

PDF24 Creator PDF24 Creator is an application software by Geek Software GmbH for the creation of PDF files from any application and for converting files to the PDF format. The application is released under a proprietary freeware license. The software has been ...

: The lightweight PDF24 Reader is part of the PDF24 Creator.

Mobile

Web-based

Creators

Converters

supported formats include OpenDocument, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats (DOC/DOCX/RTF, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) and others. * Zamzar: Online file converter *

Smallpdf Smallpdf is a Swiss online web-based PDF software, founded in 2013. It offers free services to compress, convert and edit PDF documents. History Smallpdf was founded in 2013 by Mathis Büchi, Lino Teuterberg, and Manuel Stofer while they were l ...

: Offers free (trial) online PDF conversion (PDF to other formats and vice versa)

Editors

* PDFescape: an advertising and fee supported web service to view, create forms, fill out forms, and edit PDF documents from a web browser (requires JavaScript to be enabled) * PDFVue: a free web application that allows the user to view PDFs, comment and fill PDF forms from a web browser. Generates a watermark. *

: Free (trial) web-based PDF software for editing, signing, compressing, merging, splitting, rotating, unlocking and protecting PDF files.

Viewers

* A.nnotate: a web service which views PDF documents as HTML in the browser, with annotation features. *

DigiSigner DigiSigner is a cloud-based electronic signature solution focused on ease of use, speed, and affordability. The service enables businesses and individuals to sign documents, and agreements and close deals from anywhere in the world. DigiSigner c ...

: free online PDF viewer java applet with additional function to digitally sign PDF documents. *

Docstoc Docstoc (stylized as .docstoc) was an electronic document repository and online store, aimed at providing professional, financial and legal documents for the business community. It closed in 2015. Users could upload, share and sell their own docu ...

: a web service which allows viewing PDF documents online. *

Issuu Issuu, Inc. (pronounced "issue") is a Danish-founded American electronic publishing platform based in Palo Alto, California, United States. Founded in 2004 as a Danish startup, the company moved its headquarters to the United States in 2013. ...

: a web service which allows viewing PDF documents online. * Google Docs: a web service which views PDF documents as PNG images in the browser. *

Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikh ...

: a web service which renders PDF documents as HTML5 in the browser. *

PDF.js PDF.js is a JavaScript library that renders Portable Document Format (PDF) files using the web standards-compliant HTML5 Canvas. The project is led by the Mozilla Corporation after Andreas Gal launched it (initially as an experiment) in 2011 ...

: A Javascript-based library, with viewer, and browser extension. *

PDFTron Systems Apryse, formerly PDFTron Systems Incorporated is a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. The company provides developer tools for enterprise PDF software. History Founded in 1998 by Catherine Andersz and Ivan ...

: WebViewer. A free JavaScript viewer and annotator for self-hosting of web optimized PDFs.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:List of Pdf Software PDF PDF *