PDF Tools for Free

PDF's are frequently the file format of choice, but working with them often doesn't allow much choice. What do you do if you need to edit a PDF or if you need to save a document you created in another piece of software as a PDF or even if you need the PDF to become a MS Word document?

There are some free tools out there that can be useful for the Special Needs Teacher, here are a couple of them:

CutePDF:
There are a bunch of free PDF creators out there, but CutePDF is my favorite. It is a free download and does not take up much space on your hard drive. Once it is installed it lists itself as a printer, so when you are ready to save something as a PDF you just go to print, then print options, choose CutePDF as your printer and the file is save to your hard drive as a PDF. I find this very helpful for saving online curriculum such as Edhelper.com worksheets at home and then printing them out at work from a flashdrive or my laptop. (I don't have internet at my school so I cannot log onto such website at work to print.)

PDF Hammer:
This is a Web 2.0 application that allows you to upload PDFs and apply some editing features such as re-ordering the pages or combing multiple PDFs into one file. As a Web 2.0 application there is nothing to download because everything is completely web based.


Free PDF to Word Converter:
This is software for download, the title pretty much covers what it does.

Just for Bloggers and Website Owners:
If you are one of the many teachers who have a classroom (or personal) blog or website there are two other PDF tools you might be interested in, Web2PDF allows readers of your site to turn your content into a PDF and save it to there hard drive and PDFescape allows you to post PDF forms on your website or blog for free.