Hey everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you my favorite free PDF editor, LibreOffice Draw. With LibreOffice Draw, you can edit both traditional PDFs and also scanned PDFs. It also has lots of other capabilities as well, and I’ll show you what some of those are today, and once again, best of all, it’s entirely free. Let’s jump on the PC and first off, I’ll show you how you can get it. To get LibreOffice Draw, open up your web browser and head to the website libreoffice.org. This will drop you on the LibreOffice home page. So, what is LibreOffice? Well, the easiest way to think of it is it’s kind of like Microsoft Office or Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It’s an office productivity suite and one of the applications included is called LibreOffice Draw and this allows us to edit PDFs. The nice thing about LibreOffice is it’s entirely free, and it’s also open source. On the home page, you’ll see a few different download icons. Here you can click on download or down below. Click on that. This drops us on the download page and here you can decide what version of LibreOffice you want to download. You can go with the latest and greatest version. This will have all of the most recent features, or you can give up a few of the latest features and go with something that’s a little bit older and potentially a little bit more stable. Now at least me personally, I always like being on the most recent release, so I’d go with the one right up here near the top. Over on the right-hand side, you can also choose your operating system and this works on all major platforms. Once you make your selection here, kick off the download process and then also run through the install. Once you’ve finished downloading and installing LibreOffice, go down to your taskbar and type in LibreOffice Draw and then click on the best match. This opens up LibreOffice Draw and right now we have a blank canvas. To open up a PDF, go to the top left-hand corner and click on the file menu. In the file menu, click on open. This opens up the Windows file picker and then go through and navigate to where you have your PDF file saved. I have a PDF right here called Cookie Award that I want to edit. I’ll select this file and then click on open. This now opens up my PDF. Here it is in LibreOffice Draw, but one of the really cool things now is I could click into it and look at that. I can edit any of the text in this PDF file and right here we see that there is an upcoming award for the world’s best cookie, and it looks like it was awarded to Mrs. Fields. That must be a mistake here. I’ll simply go in here and let’s update this to the Kevin Cookie Company. Once I make my edits, here I can reposition the text. I’ll place it so it appears right here in the center. Also, it looks like it’s in recognition of Mrs. Martha Fields. I think that’s also a mistake as well. Let me just update this to be my name, Kevin Stratvert. That looks much better now, and this is just a very simple example of how you can take an existing PDF and then make a quick edit. But right now, this file is in LibreOffice Draw. How do I get it back into PDF format? Right up here on top on the toolbar, there’s the option to export directly as PDF. Let’s click on this. This opens up the Windows save dialog, and here I see the title. I can now save it as cookie award again and that’ll overwrite the existing copy. I’ll just put a dash in and let me call this revised. I’ve typed in my new name. Now I’ll click on save. Now when I open up the revised PDF in a PDF viewer, I can see this updated PDF. So right here we now see that the world’s best cookie truly is from the Kevin Cookie Company, and this is now a PDF, so it must be official. OK, so it’s pretty easy to edit an existing PDF. One of the frequent situations that I run into is I have a form and I need to fill out that form. Now, some PDFs are structured in a way where you can click into the form and you can edit it, but sometimes it’s not that easy. You can also fill out a form using LibreOffice Draw. Once again, let’s go to the file menu and click on open. This once again opens up the Windows file picker. Navigate to where you have your PDF form and then click on open. This opens up my PDF order form and it opened it just fine and here too I could even click on the order form, and I could edit some of this text. Now I want to go through, and I want to fill out this order form. Right up here on the top toolbar, I can insert a text box. When I hover over, you’ll also see that I can press the F2 key to insert a text box. Here I’ll click on this and let me come right down here, maybe for the cookie order form, let me type in my name first. I’ve typed in my name and here I can reposition where it appears, and that looks pretty good. That’s aligned properly with this form. If I want to change the font or the font size, here I can right click on the text, and I can go down to character. Right in here, I can choose what font I want. I could also set the size right here, so there are all sorts of ways that I can modify what the text looks like that I insert into my form. Down below on my order form, it also asks me to sign to complete my order. Now, typically when you’re filling out a PDF, a lot of times you have to sign your PDF and it’s kind of a pain because you have to print out the document, then you have to sign it, then you have to scan it back in. But what if you could just sign it before you even print it? You could very easily insert an electronic signature. Right up here, I’ll go to the insert menu and let me insert an image. Once again, this opens up the Windows file picker and right here I have a PNG file with my signature. I’ll click on open. Right here, I’ve now inserted an image of my signature and I can position this wherever I want on my PDF, so I’ll put it right down here on the signature field. If you’re wondering, well, how did I even get my signature file into a PNG file? I’ve included another video that I did previously in the description of this video that’ll walk you through how you can create your very own electronic signature. Once you create that, you could insert it into any of your PDF documents. So far, we’ve been looking at traditional PDFs. These have all been created on a computer and then I’ve opened directly on the computer, but what if you have a PDF that’s a scanned document? So maybe you have a scanner, and it turns it into a PDF automatically. Can you work with those as well? And you can. Let’s go up to the file menu and once again let’s click on open. Right at the very bottom, I have a letter from YouTube when I hit 100,000 subscribers. They sent me a letter, so I took a picture of it, and I turned it into a PDF. So, I’ll select this file and let’s see if we can edit this. I’ll click on open. This opens up the letter, and first off, that was very friendly of Susan to write me this personal letter, and she even signed it. I’m really surprised she has the time as the CEO of YouTube. Now right now when I look at this, it’s just an image file and I can’t actually edit it. So, does that mean I can’t work with scanned PDF files? Well here if I take the file and let’s move it over to the side, here you’ll see the underlying text of this PDF file, and right here, just like we could do before, I can click in, and I could edit any of the text. Unfortunately, though, you’ll see one thing. Here when I highlight some of the text, it only highlights that specific word. But what if I want to go through and I want to edit the overall text, or I want to edit some of these paragraphs. Well, right here I can highlight all of this text right here. So, right now everything is highlighted, and I’ll right click on this box. Right at the bottom of this menu, I have the option to consolidate the text and when I click on consolidate the text, it’ll turn it into paragraph form. So, here now I could go through, and I could edit all of the text right here. So here too, even with scanned PDFs or photo PDFs, I can also bring that into LibreOffice Draw and then I can edit it. You’ll notice one thing though. Some of the text isn’t formatted 100% right. Here for example, you don’t doesn’t have a space in between, and so it didn’t convert it precisely how it appears over here on the right-hand side. Also, some of the paragraphs are a little off. Here I have to add some space, but all-in-all, it took the text from this picture, and it converted it into text that I can edit. So, this is pretty impressive that it’s able to extract that from a PDF, and then I could go through, and I could edit this file. So, although there is a little bit of overhead on me to now clean this up and correct it a little bit, it got most of the text in. Along with being able to edit individual files, right now I have all three of my LibreOffice Draw windows open, and each one has one of these PDF files open. One of the great things is I can now merge all of these files together. So, here I have my world’s best cookie award. Here I could take that PDF and I could drag it into my letter from YouTube and maybe I take my cookie order form and I’ll drag that in as well. So now if I click into this LibreOffice Draw window, here you’ll see that all of my PDFs have now been combined, and here I could rearrange the order. So maybe I want to place the cookie order form first. Here I could drag it and I could place it right up here at the top. I could go through. I could delete pages, so I could effectively control what my combined PDF looks like. Now that I have all of my pages combined, I could go right up to the top just like we did earlier in this video and I could export everything directly as a PDF and I’d be all done, but maybe I want to choose what pages I want to export. Maybe I want to add a watermark and take advantage of some other capabilities. Let’s go up to the file menu and right here there’s an option to export as. Let’s click on export as PDF to see what we can do. This opens up different PDF options and I have quite a few different options that I can choose from. I want to show you some of the ones that you might be most likely to use. Right down here, you can choose what range of pages you want to include in your PDF, so here I’ll click on pages and maybe I just want to include the certificate in my PDF, so I’ll type in page 3. So, here you could decide what pages you want to include. Down below, I can also decide to include a watermark, so I’ll click on sign with the watermark, and then maybe I’ll type in official. There’s nothing like typing in official to make a document truly official. I have all these other tabs that give me additional capabilities, but let’s click on this one called security. Right over here, I can also set a password on my PDF. Let’s click on this. Right here, I can set an open password and I can also set a permission password. I’m going to type in one of the most secure passwords I know, Cookie. Once I finish typing in my password, I’ll click on OK. I’ve now configured everything that I want to configure. Next, I’ll click on export. This opens up an export prompt and here I’ll type in the file name Best Cookie Company award and then I’ll click on save. When I try to open my file, here it prompts me for a password. I password protected it, so I’ll type in the secret passcode of Cookie and then we’ll click open, and look at this, there’s the world’s best cookie award given to the Kevin Cookie Company, and look at that, it is official, so we truly are the best cookie company. We’re going to have to post this on our website just to let the world know. I’m now back in LibreOffice Draw and along with being able to export as a PDF and set some different settings, I could also export as different file types. For this, I’ll go up to the file menu and then let’s go down to the option called export. This opens up the export dialog and right down here once again I can type in a name for my export, but along with that, I have this dropdown that shows me all of these different file types that I can save my PDF as. For example, I can create an HTML document. Basically, I take my PDF pages and I could turn it into an HTML page. I could also save it as different image formats. Here I have Windows bitmap. I have a GIF. I have a JPEG, a PNG, so this is a really easy way to take a PDF and then to convert it into a different format. As you could probably tell by now, LibreOffice Draw has a ton of capabilities for working with PDF files, but I do want to leave you with one last feature. I won’t have time to go through all the details in this video, but I do want to hint at what else is possible. If we go up to the view menu, let’s go down to toolbars and here we can click on form controls. You can create a PDF form using LibreOffice Draw. If you’re interested in learning more about this, I’ve included a link to a video that goes into more detail around this, but once again, there’s a lot of reasons why LibreOffice Draw is my favorite free PDF editor. It has so much functionality, and once again, you don’t have to pay anything for it. All right, well, that’s how easy it is to edit PDFs. If this video helped you, please give it a thumbs up. To see more videos like this in the future, please consider subscribing. Also, if you want to see me cover any other topics on this channel, leave a note down below. All right, well that’s all I had for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and as always, I hope to see you next time, bye.