The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Reader Recommendations => Topic started by: FtWorthAtheist on January 02, 2022, 03:13:35 PM
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I've tried trial versions of several Acrobat alternatives and none have done what I needed easily even though my needs are very modest. I need to view PDFs, merge 2 PDF files, and delete pages out of PDFs, and save them with those changes. That's it. For this functionality, Adobe wants me to buy Acrobat Pro with a gazillion features I won't use and pay $14.99/mo with a year committment or $24.99/mo without the commitment. I'm not against paying something, but that's just too darned much to pay for my limited requirements. I use my receipt scanner to scan documents to searchable PDFs for personal documents and documents related to my side hustle, so I end up producing a LOT of PDF files, so I'd prefer software I can run on my local machine rather than uploading my sensitive data to a website.
I ask my fellow mustachians for frugal suggestions...
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The only two I know of personally are PDFsam Basic and PDFedit (supported on every platform, technically one better than the other), which may or may not completely cover what you're looking to do. This said, deleting entire fixed pages out of a PDF are pretty easy given PDF printing is integrated into every operating system at this point. Just do a new PDF print of the PDF document in question (print 1-4, 6-10, 12), and just set the pages printed in the document to the ones you don't want excised. This could even be used to print existing document pages in a whole new order (print 1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 6-12). Of course, this may break existing OCR, though there's a solution to that.
https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/ (https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/)
http://pdfedit.cz/en/index.html (http://pdfedit.cz/en/index.html)
Slightly related, PDF OCR features... just in case. I know your own scanner is apparently already doing OCR on your scanned documents given what you typed, but in case anyone else finds the thread and needs PDF OCR features as well or need to re-add it due to using the system PDF printer... PDF OCR X is a good offline option as well.
http://solutions.weblite.ca/pdfocrx/ (http://solutions.weblite.ca/pdfocrx/)
Hope it helps!
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I use cutepdf for those functions.
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I use PDFill's PDFTools, which has lots of handy functions and is free. (Windoze)
Don't mind their 90s-style website, LOL. https://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html (https://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html)
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Preview on Mac does the OP's tasks.
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I use PDF 24. It is free and can be used online or downloaded.
https://en.pdf24.org/ (https://en.pdf24.org/)
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Great suggestions here. Thanks!