Summary
- > Draw or write on a PDF from an iPad
- > Draw or write on a PDF from a tablet
- > Draw or write on a PDF from Mac or PC
Conventional PDF readers do not allow freehand drawing or writing on documents. Many software programs, including Adobe's Acrobat Reader, make it easy to highlight text or add your signature. Others change the layout of the document, usually at some cost.
What if you just want to edit plans or your child wants to draw?
Here are the easiest tricks to transform a PDF document into one or more images from which you can edit using an artistic application.
We have chosen completely free programs, but nothing prevents you from using Photoshop or an application such as Procreate.
Recommended article: iPhone/iPad: the best drawing apps
Draw or write on a PDF from an iPad
The first step is to turn your PDF into an image or a series of images. If your PDF has only one page, then take a screenshot, if it has several, do this for each page.
You can use pdf2jpg.net to convert your PDFs to JPGs, then you will either have to download each JPG or compress them into ZIP. Note that using ZIP files in iOS is a pain because not all files can be extracted at once.
Also, be careful, we don't know anything about the people behind pdf2jpg.net, we advise you to avoid it for legal and confidential documents.
Once you have your images, you will need an art application. We recommend the free Autodesk Sketchbook app.
It has a large number of tools and is very accessible to the youngest. It will be convenient for you to simply add notes to a document, letters, numbers, etc.
For the more artistic among us, there's the Sketch app.
Draw or write on a PDF from a tablet
The process is identical to the previous one, on iPad, take a screenshot of each page. Then use Autodesk SketchBook to draw or write over your images.
If you have an Amazon Fire tablet, then ArtFlow is more suitable.
Draw or write on a PDF from a Mac or PC
The ideal software for editing a PDF from a computer is Adobe Photoshop. It allows you to open PDFs directly, choosing the pages you want or opening them all.
However, Photoshop is not free, so the subscription allows you to use Photoshop for the iPad as well, but not to open PDFs...
If your PDF document is composed of several pages, then pdf2jpg helps you.
As before, once the screenshots are done, download an app like Autodesk Sketchbook; it exists for Mac and Windows.
