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Jul 31 2007

Modify PDF Documents from Windows Explorer

Posted by: Matt in Fresh from the Web, tags: , ,

If you work with PDF documents regularly then maybe you’re already aware of batches in Acrobat and what a life-saver they can be. I’d like to take that a step in a different direction and enable PDF manipulation directly from Windows Explorer.

PDF-ShellTools does just that, it adds a section to your right click menu in Windows Explorer with a lot of functionality. I use it to set open options for lots of PDFs at once without opening Acrobat. It’s also been very helpful in adding or viewing metadata. Did I mention it’s free?

Here are a list of features copied from their site:

  • PDF-Anonymize - Remove all the metadata traces from the PDF files.
  • PDF-Split/Extract - Extract pages, or range of pages, into new PDF documents.
  • PDF-Merge/Rearrange - Merge several PDF documents, or rearrange source file pages structure, into a new PDF document.
  • PDF-Insert/Append - Insert one, or more, documents pages after, or before, a specified page number of another PDF document.
  • PDF-Attachments - Add, remove, consult and extract PDF file attachments.
  • PDF-Set Open Options - Configure the initial view of PDF documents. Can set, full screen mode, initial page, initial magnification, layout, page mode, etc.
  • PDF-Set/Reset Password Security - Control the access to the PDF documents contents using password protection.
  • PDF-Stamp/Watermark - Stamp text, images and shapes into PDF documents pages.
  • PDF-Extract Text Content - Extract the PDF documents text content into text files.
  • PDF-Renamer - Rename, and organize by folders, the PDF documents using its metadata information as source to compose the file name or folder structure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Fresh from the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Modify PDF Documents from Windows Explorer”
  1. Design for MySpace says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 9:14 am

    Matt - Which one can we use to enter text in PDF ?

  2. Matt says:
    August 25th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    Hi Design for MySpace, thanks for your question. Although in this set of shell tools there is an option to add additional pdf pages to an existing pdf file, it doesn’t provide an option to add or edit text within a page. Right now this functionality is mostly limited to solutions that cost money. Though if anyone knows differently please correct me!

    Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish it might be helpful to use the extract pdf text feature, and paste it into an editable file type like Word or Publisher. That way you could edit the text and export a new pdf using a free tool like PrimoPDF.

    Hope that helps! Thanks, -Matt

  3. online shopping says:
    August 4th, 2008 at 9:11 am

    I see that Openoffice.org has announced that in their next release they expect to provide PDF editing and modifying capabilities. Now, that is indeed very interesting. I don’t know how happy Adobe is going to be about it, but one thing is for sure – it is going to be very useful. It can also be very dangerous. I guess we’ll have to password protect invoices etc. because in the past a PDF was useful to send as a non-editable document, but this will change things in an incredible way. Interested to see what’s going to happen!

  4. fine art says:
    November 17th, 2008 at 3:15 am

    Hi Matt!

    The ones you’ve mentioned are really great help. But I was just wondering if you can provide at least 3 apps which will allow people to convert PDFs into Word document. I know lots of Word-PDF converter but the reverse is quite hard to find.

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