A pack of PDF apps to keep close
Out of all file formats, PDFs always seemed the clumsiest and hardest-to-change. But they are not going anywhere, so let’s learn to live with them.
Chat with PDFs using AI
PDF Pals lets you find information, summarize, and learn from PDF documents using AI. Just ask the right questions.
Bookmark with Hookmark
Bookmarks are cool, hookmarks are even cooler. The app can create “deep links” to specific sections or paragraphs within your PDFs, so you can jump right to them from other files, notes, or wherever you save your links.
Note: Deep linking will only work with certain PDF editors, such as Nitro PDF Pro, also available with Setapp. More on Nitro in a sec.
Here’s a little PDF thriller
Two years ago, we wrote a book for Mac users. It was a year-long project and a big deal. Now imagine this. Two days before the release, we convert the original doc to PDF and it all goes wrong. Illustrations on the wrong pages. Fonts distorted. And we have 48 hours to fix it. Sigh.
These three apps saved us:
Edit with Nitro PDF Pro
Nitro PDF Pro makes it easy to edit PDFs: you can scribble, draw, highlight, correct text — whatever it takes to get the point across. We used the app to add text annotations with the word “fix” throughout the file for the designer to know what should be fixed.
Search with PDF Search
Next step, our designer had to go through the annotations and fix mistakes. He first tried to use Command + F to search for “fix.” But it quickly turned out the word “fix” was everywhere — and not only in annotations. Well, it’s a book about how to fix things on Mac so...we could have predicted it.
PDF Search helped us by ranking search results with the word “fix” to see the recent edits first. This is how text annotations with the word “fix” were instantly prioritized.
Compress with PDF Squeezer
Once we fixed it all, the only thing left was to press the Submit button for the book to go live on Amazon and other platforms. But wait, another problem. Most platforms have file size limitations, and the book was too heavy for almost all of them.
PDF Squeezer helped reduce the book size by 58%.
That’s how we didn’t break the deal and got the book published as planned.
Hope this how-to will help you solve tasks faster, and enjoy solving them, too! Check out more how-tos picked for you below.
