Anyone who regularly uses PDFs will appreciate the iOS/iPad PDF Genius app. Convert, compress, organize: it’s all possible. How, you can read that in this how-to.
PDF Genius (€9.99) is a kind of Swiss Army knife for PDF files. One of the nice options is the ability to convert a page from a PDF to a graphic file. This can come in handy if you want to process (part of) a PDF into an image.
To do this, first open a PDF file. Click on the button with the three lines at the top left of the screen. click on Traffic jams and browse to a folder containing a PDF file, select and open it. Once open in reading view, click the toolbox icon.
Select the desired file format, choose a resolution (dpi), remembering that the higher the resolution, the larger the final file. If you want to further edit an image, it is best to choose a lossless file format such as PNG or TIFF.
Finally, pay attention to the options behind Pages† If you want to convert one page, make sure it is visible and choose Single† This is to prevent a complete 300+ page PDF from being converted to images…
To save the resulting image(s), tap the share button at the top right of the opened screen. Then tap all and choose one of the available sharing options. For example Save Image to place the case on your device’s camera roll. From there, you can open the image in any image editor to get started.
Compress PDF
A disadvantage of PDFs is that they can sometimes become quite large. Especially if high-quality images are chosen, and there are many images present. Other factors can also cause oversized PDFs. That is inconvenient if you want to share such a file with others; it quickly becomes too large for a standard attachment in an email message.
To solve that problem, you can have PDF Genius perform a compression action on the PDF. What PDF compression does is lower the dpi to a value you specify, while also adjusting the compression strength in levels.
Open a PDF and tap the toolbox. In the opened menu, choose compression† For screen reading PDFs, 72 dpi is sufficient, so make sure that this option is also selected. Color images take up more space than grayscale images, which in turn takes up more space than pure black and white images. Colorless images are often fine for a quick proofreading. Choose what you need.
In front of Quality applies: the less, the smaller the final PDF, but also the less ‘beautiful’ it looks. below Optimize graphics you can choose from 5 levels. Whereby applies that Level 1 provides the lowest compression, with good image quality. But that level also ensures a greater end result.
Bee Level 5 it is exactly the other way around: lower image quality and a smaller PDF. We’d say just experiment with it. Tap on compression and you see the result. Sharing to, for example, an email attachment can be arranged via the share button. In the viewer you can view original and compressed version by tapping Compare put next to each other.
Split and merge
Another common PDF management chore is PDF merging and splitting. PDF Genius does not care about that either. Open a multi-page PDF. Tap the button with the four squares (left of the toolbox) for a page overview. Tap the floppy disk (= Save as) and give your PDF a new name. This is to prevent the original from being overwritten during your experiments.
First, you can drag pages into the overview and place them in a different place. Can be useful at times. Practical is the possibility to delete empty pages. To do that, tap the toolbox (moved a little more to the right in this mode) and tap Delete blank pages† After a while, they are all gone from the document.
Sometimes it is practical to add correctly; can also be done via the toolbox and associated option. The page is via Insert blank page added for the page selected in the overview by tapping.
You can also add PDFs to the PDF open in the page manager. Tap the toolbox and then insert† Choose where you want to insert the PDF to be selected in the document, Before first page (for the first page), After last page (after the last page) or At index page (on the index page). In this example we are going for After last page†
Choose one of the available source options, for example Traffic jams† Browse to a folder containing the PDF to add and select it with a tap, after which the PDF will be added in the indicated place. Tap on the ‘regular’ diskette (ie without a pen) to save the thus merged document.
A nice detail is that you can also add images to the PDF in the same way.
Spin and more
Also note the button bar at the bottom of the page management. Allows you to copy and paste pages, copy a page directly after it, rotate a page, or delete a page. The action can also be applied to multiple pages at the same time, just hold your finger on one of the pages in your PDF until a menu appears.
In this, tap (for example) Select all to select all pages. This way you can run all pages at once. This sometimes comes in handy with photographed pages where the gyroscope in your smartphone just chose the wrong orientation while holding the device horizontally. The page rotates 90 degrees with each tap, tap as often as needed.
PDF Genius has many more tricks on board, just go through all the options. For example, you can set passwords or adjust metadata. Searching for text, exporting only text and scrolling through chapters is also taken care of. Very handy piece of equipment as far as we’re concerned! And all without annoying subscriptions for now.
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