The PDF format is among the most popular for those who work with digital documents, due to its well-known advantages. Designed as an open-source alternative to mainstream PDF editors, KillerPDF delivers a full-featured PDF toolbox that not only allows exploring the content of PDF documents, but also handles annotating and watermarking, merging, organizing and extracting pages, signatures and OCR.
Organize pages as you wish and work with multiple PDF documents
It came as a surprise to see that KillerPDF is a portable tool, but there is an option to install it on the local computer for all the users, provided you have administrative rights.
The application is definitely not the most complex PDF suite, and perhaps that is actually what makes it stand out. It comes packed with a consistent feature set that allows PDF manipulation and editing, starting with a tab-based interface that allows working with multiple documents at the same time.
A preview of the current page is shown in the left side panel, which also can be used as a document navigator and a page editor, since its right-click menu allows duplicating pages and inserting new ones, rotating pages, moving pages around inside the document, extracting and deleting pages.
Generous annotation, signing and watermarking toolset inside a true PDF editor
The annotation toolset is shown in the upper toolbar, consisting of text annotations,, highlighters to bring important text to focus, lines and shapes, free drawing and rasterizing tools.
I found it particularly interesting that you can add new text inside the document but that is not all: KillerPDF helps you select and rewrite the original text inside the document. In other words, this application allows for true text editing of a PDF document.
Additional options include merging PDF documents, cropping content, extracting and deleting pages, or adding images inside the document. Moreover, KillerPDF provides you with tools to help you create your own signature and place it on top of your document’s pages. Page numbering, watermarking and page stamping are also possible.
Open-source PDF editor and viewer with multiple functionalities
Cost-free PDF editors usually allow placing text on top of a page in a PDF document, so it was a nice surprise to see that KillerPDF comes with real editing capabilities. Moreover, the array of functionalities that it comes with, including side by side PDF comparison, PDF flattening, printing and text extracting make it worth your while. I would say that format conversion is probably what might add to its value in future releases.