We’re going to look at the best free PDF editor, PDFgear. If you work with PDFs, this is the only software you’ll ever need. With it, you can edit text and add new text, convert from PDF to many different file formats like Microsoft Word. Sign. Annotate. You can even ask AI questions about your PDF. It works on Windows, Mac, iOS, and coming soon, Android. Again, this is all free. No ads, no watermarks, and you don’t even have to provide any personal information to sign up. I partnered with PDFgear to show you how this works, so let’s check it out. To get PDFgear, head to the following website. You can click on the card in the top right-hand corner, and I’ve also included a link down below in the description. Once you land on this website, click on the button that says "Free Download." Once you finish installing and launch PDFgear, you’ll land in an interface that looks like this. Up at the very top, you’ll see some of the most common actions that you might want to take with PDFs. For example, you can convert a PDF to Microsoft Word. Over here, you can compress a PDF file. That way, it takes up less space. Right up on top, now click on Merge and Split, and over here, you can merge together two separate PDFs into one, or you can take one PDF file and then split it out into two. Right up on top, if we click into All Tools, here you’ll see all the different actions that you could take with PDFs. Again, this is the only tool you’ll ever need when working with PDFs. Now, I have an existing PDF file that I would like to edit, so over on the left-hand side, I’ll click on Open File, and there’s my file. I’ll double-click on that. This now opens up my PDF document, and I’m currently writing the story of the Kevin Cookie Company, and here I just got a draft back from my publisher. Right up on top, you’ll see all these different menus, and when I click into any one of them, you’ll see all the different associated tools, and we’ll go through some of the most common ones that you might want to use with a PDF. Right here on the Home tab, we have all sorts of different controls. Here, I could adjust the fit of the document. Here, I could go to the actual size, and here I could fit it to the page. Right over here, one of my favorites, you could turn on something called Auto Scroll, and this will help you read your document. Here, you’ll see it’s scrolling, and I could even adjust the speed. Let’s turn that off. You could also turn on something called Slideshow Mode, which I think makes it really easy to consume a PDF. I’ll press Escape to exit. One of my favorites, you also have something called OCR. This will allow you to select an area of your document, and then you can extract the text from an image. It’s really impressive. Now, just looking at this, this interface is really bright right now. In the top right-hand corner, I’ll click on this icon, and right here, I could shift it into dark mode. And look at that. That is so much easier on the eyes. On second thought, I think I would actually prefer it to be light. So, right up here, I’ll click back on that menu, and here I could toggle back to the light theme. I think this looks really good. Now, I need to start making some revisions to this document before I send it back to the publisher. So, let’s take a quick look here to see if there are any corrections that I need to make. And here, I spotted one thing. Here it says that we were founded in Oregon, but it actually turns out that we were founded in Washington. So, right up on top, I think I need to make an annotation. I could click on this menu right here, and this shows me all of my different annotation tools. For example, you could highlight text, you could underline, strike through, you could highlight an area. You could even insert all these different shapes or ink. And here, I have a few more tools. Now, I want to highlight the text Oregon. So, I’ll click on highlight right here, and down below, I can choose the highlight color. Currently, it’s set to yellow, and I think that will work fine. That will really draw attention. I’ll select that, and then down below, here I could highlight that text. And there, we now see it highlighted in yellow. But I think I also need to call out what it should be. So, right up on top here, I could add a text box, add text. Let me click on note. I think this will work well. So, with note selected, here I could click into my document, and that now adds a note. And let’s say, please change this to Washington. Now that I’ve typed in my note, I could close out of this, and here, I could position a note, so it appears right on top of Oregon. Now, if someone clicks on this icon, that exposes the note, and the publisher will know what change to make here. Now, I’ll close out of this. As I’m working through this document and making modifications, I want it to be clear that this is a draft. So, let’s go all the way back up to the top. And within annotation, over on the right-hand side, I can even insert a stamp. When I click on this, we have some preset stamps, and I could even make my very own custom stamp. But for this, I think a preset will work. I’ll hover over preset, and here, we see all the different stamps that I can insert. Here, for example, there’s one that says draft, and that’ll fit my needs perfectly. I’ll click on that, and now I can put the stamp anywhere I want on my document. I’ll place it right there, and over here, I can even adjust the size. Let me make it a little larger, just so it’s really clear that this is a draft. Maybe I’ll put it right there in the center of the page, that way, no one will miss it. Looking at the title, I think this is a big missed opportunity. We say an amazing success story, which this obviously is, but I think it would be more fitting to say a sweet success story. To edit the text that I see here, I’ll go up to edit up on top, and here we see all the different edit tools. I want to edit text, so over here, let’s click on edit text. I now see a rectangle around all of the different text that I can edit in this PDF. Here, if we scroll down, you can see that I can edit any text throughout. Let’s go back up here to the title, and I want to change this to a sweet success story. So over here, let me delete an amazing, and in place of that, I’ll type in a sweet. Now, right up on top, here I could also adjust the font. I can make a bold, italics. I could also adjust the color, and here, I could also adjust the size. But I think for now, this looks good, so let’s click on exit editing, and right over here, let’s save the changes. The title now looks good, but here, looking at the logo, it turns out this is our old logo. Here, I could simply select an image file in my PDF, and over on the right-hand side, I get this edit icon. When I click on that, I have different options. You could do things like rotate, or here, you could extract text from an image. But this is outdated, so let’s click on delete, and that’ll remove the image. I’ll click on yes, and now we have this blank space. Within the edit menu, let’s click on add image, and over here is the new logo for the Kevin Cookie Company. I’ll click on that, and now I can insert this directly into the PDF. Here, let’s adjust the size just a little bit, and here, I’ll place it right in the center. I think that looks really good. Let’s now go to the very end of the PDF. I’ll click on this icon, and this brings us all the way to the bottom. Right here, I’ve included a page with a thank you to all of our customers. Without our customers, we wouldn’t have been able to build the company to where it is, but I’d also like to include a signature. Also, on edit, over on the right-hand side, we have the option to insert a signature. When I click on this, here, let’s create a signature. This now opens up a dialog, and you have a few different options. Here, we can add a picture of your signature, and over here, if you have a background, you could remove the background, so it just keeps the signature. That works very well. Over here, you could also type in your signature, or if you have a touchscreen, or if you want to try using your mouse, you could also write it into this space. I’m simply going to type in my signature. Here, let’s type in Kevin Stratvert, and of course, that doesn’t look very much like a signature, so let’s click on this font drop-down, and over here, let’s choose a font that looks a little bit more like a signature. Maybe this one right here, the script. That looks good. I’ll click on OK, and now I could place my signature into the document. That looks great. Let’s save the document so far. I’ll click on this icon, and over here, let’s save the PDF and flatten it. I think it would actually make more sense to move this thank you to the very beginning of the book instead of near the end. I mean, I don’t know how many people are going to make it through this entire story. I don’t know if it’s that exciting. So, up on top, let’s click on page, and here I have all sorts of different options. You can extract or pull out pages from your PDF. You could delete pages. You could also insert new pages. You could insert another PDF, a Word document, or even images. You could crop pages, and you could even rotate pages. I just want to adjust the position of a page. Here, I see my thank you page at the very end. I’ll press and hold on that page, and I can now place it in a new position. Let’s put it right after the title page. There, I’ll release, and it says, "Are you sure you want to reorder the selected pages?" I am. I’ll click on yes, and there I now have the new order. That was so easy. Before I send this book back to the publisher, I would like to include a summary of the book that we can include on the back cover. To do that, let’s click back on the Home tab, and over on the right-hand side, let’s see if maybe AI can help with this. There’s something called the PDFgear Copilot. Now, if you don’t see this pane, let’s say it were closed, right down in the bottom right-hand corner, you should also see this icon. If you click on that, that opens up this pane. Let’s see if this can help by clicking on chat now. This now opens up some sample prompts that I can use to converse with the AI. For example, here, I can have it summarize this PDF file, and in a moment, I’ll click on this, but you could also command the AI. For example, if you want to add a password to your PDF file, you could simply ask the AI to do that for you. Down below, you could also type in prompts directly to the AI, so let’s say you want to ask questions about the PDF, or maybe you want to command. You could do all of that down below. I simply want a summary, so I’ll click on this, and let’s see if it could summarize this document. Look at that. I get it back almost immediately. And the summary looks really solid. I think I could use this, and I could send this to the publisher. Now that I’m all done making edits to this document, I’m ready to share it back with my publisher. Although, they’ve requested that I share it as a Word document. Luckily, that’s no problem. Right up on top, let’s click on tools, and here we have all these different tools. And the first option is to convert this PDF. When I click on this, you’ll see all the different file formats that you can convert your PDF to. Chances are, if you need to convert it into another format, you’ll find it here. Now, right at the very top, there’s the option to convert a PDF to Word. I’ll click on that, and right here, I see the option to convert it. Now, if I wanted to say bulk convert multiple files, I could even add more files here. But I just need to convert this one file, and this range looks good. So down below, I’ll click on convert. And look at that. The conversion was successful, and I now have a Word document. That was great. I’ll close out of this. I would also like to save a copy of this PDF for myself, but there are so many different images in this file, and I think it takes up a lot of space right now. So, I would like to compress it to make it a little bit smaller. Up on top, let’s click into the tools menu. And over on the left-hand side, we have the option for compress. When I click on that, that opens up a dialog. And here, I have the option to compress the file. And here too, I could also add additional files if I would like to bulk compress PDFs. I just need to compress this one, and here I see it’s selected. I can now select the compression level. Let’s go with high compression. That way, I’ll get the smallest file size possible. Right down here, I see the output path. That looks good. Let’s now click on compress. And just like that, look at that. The file size was originally two megabytes, and it got it all the way down to 1.26. That takes up a lot less space. And especially if you have lots of different PDFs, this is a quick way to reduce the file size that they consume. In the top right-hand corner, I’ll now close out of this dialog, and I think this PDF is all set to go. Keep an eye out for a new book on the Kevin Cookie Company. And again, you get all of this entirely for free. And on that point, you may be wondering how could it be possible to offer all of this for free. It costs a lot of money to hire a team and also to develop software. In conversations with the PDFgear team, offering the product for free is a great way to grow the product. At some point in the future, they plan on offering premium and advanced functionality, and they’ll charge for that. For example, think of the AI chatbot. However, the essential features like merging or splitting or just the basic editing features will always be kept free. They indicated that premium features will cost significantly less than the competition, and that they’ll also communicate out any premium features far in advance. To watch more videos like this one, please consider subscribing and have fun editing your PDFs, for free.