#GISTribe
Tip of the Week #3

PDFs

For years I've used PDF-XChange Viewer to export PDFs into a usable bitmap format such as PNG or TIFF. This is great when you’ve got a map scans and need to get them geo-referenced, or just need to make changes to it in your favorite graphics program.

But another great feature it has I only recently discovered is it’s built-in OCR engine. You can take a graphic PDF, run the OCR and and re-save it as a text searchable PDF. I've recently used this in conjunction with the TurboScan app available for Android and iOS with impressive results. With TurboScan, you can use your phone’s camera to grab a picture of a page, it automatically crops to the page size and fixes the angles resulting in a scan rivaling your average flatbed scanner. Additionally, you can create multi-page PDFs with TurboScan as well. It is a pay app, but for $2.99, it’s a bargain!

And for the last PDF tool I’ll talk about today is if you need do some PDF document management, it doesn't come easier than PDFSAM (PDF Split and Merge). Turn a batch of PDFs into one multi-page, rearrange or delete pages from multi-page, or save out a portion of a PDF document. All while retaining any searchable text.

PDFs just got a lot easier.