PDF Studio

PDF Studio is included from the Pro plan (Pro, Enterprise and White-label); on the Free plan a PDF still opens in the plain viewer and downloads. Open any PDF in your Drive and work on it like a real PDF application: read, comment, fill, sign, reorganise and save, all in the browser. Your changes are saved back into the PDF itself, so anyone you send it to sees them in any PDF reader.

1. 1

   Read & find

   Page thumbnails, bookmarks, search with highlighted results, zoom and fit controls, full-screen reading and printing.

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   Reading and marking up without a mouse

   Press F7, or the text-cursor button on the View tab, and you get a cursor in the page itself: the arrow keys move it, Shift and the arrows select, Ctrl and the arrows move a word at a time, Home and End jump to the start or end of a line, Ctrl with them to the start or end of the page, and Escape clears the selection and then turns the cursor off. Once text is selected the same small menu a mouse drag raises appears, and Shift+F10 (or the menu key on your keyboard) puts you inside it, so Highlight, Underline and Strikethrough are all reachable without touching a mouse - and the three buttons on the ribbon mark a keyboard selection too. A screen reader is told what is selected in words, not just how many characters.

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   Annotate

   Highlight, underline or strike out text, add sticky notes, free text, drawings, shapes, arrows and stamps such as APPROVED or DRAFT, in your choice of colours, with undo and redo. Marks stack, so you can put a second colour over part of something you have already highlighted; where a mark cannot be made at all, you are told rather than left guessing.

4. 4

   Fill & sign

   Fill in PDF forms and place your signature, drawn or typed, and export everything that has been filled in to a spreadsheet.

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   Organise pages

   Reorder pages by dragging, rotate or delete pages, pull selected pages out into a new PDF, or merge another PDF onto the end. Split splits one document into several: every so many pages, at each bookmark, at page ranges you name, or one file per page - and before it writes anything it tells you if any page would end up in no file at all, or in two, which is the mistake nobody notices until the bundle has been filed. Your original is never written over.

6. 6

   Blackout (redaction)

   Mark private text or areas and apply the blackout: the content underneath is permanently removed from the file, not just covered up. You are asked to confirm, because this cannot be undone.

7. 7

   Links, initials and going back

   Annotate > Link lets you draw a box and point it at a web address or another page in the document, as a real link any PDF reader honours, and Detect Links finds every web and email address already printed in the pages and offers to turn them all into working links in one pass - it shows you what it found first, so nothing appears that you did not agree to. Links can be given a border colour, and existing ones restyled. A long action like this, or initials across forty pages, is a SINGLE undo rather than forty. Forms & Sign > Initials saves your initials once and stamps them on every page of a contract in a single action, or over a page range. Previous view and next view (Alt+Left and Alt+Right) step back to where you were after following a link or jumping to a page.

8. 8

   Page numbering and stamps

   The Page Layout tab stamps the pages themselves: Bates numbering for legal work (a prefix, a starting number, leading zeros, any corner, over a page range), headers and footers with page-number and date codes, watermarks at any angle and strength, and Flatten to lock filled form fields. These are drawn into the file, so anyone opening it in any PDF reader sees them.

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   Scanned paper documents

   A scanned PDF is just a photo of a page. Use “Make searchable (OCR)” and the platform reads the scan and adds real text to it, so search and highlighting work on it like any other PDF.