PDFs

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on PDFs:

All the ways to take a screenshot in iPadOS

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An iPad Pro case can prevent your Apple Pencil from charging.
The Apple Pencil can now take screenshots!
Photo: Apple

Like skinning a cat, there’s more than one way to take a screenshot on the iPhone and iPad. And with the launch of iPadOS 13, there’s now one more way to snap a picture of your screen on the iPad.

Let’s check out all the ways to take a screenshot on an iPad running iOS 13.

How to take iOS 13’s new PDF screenshots, including text!

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iOS 13 pdf screenshots
Screenshots are even better in iOS 13.
Photo: Daniel von Appen/Unsplash

The screenshot tool gets a radical makeover in iOS 13, and I’m not even talking about the fancy new toolbar for Apple Pencil markup. You can take advantage of two cool new features when you snap a screenshot in the upcoming version of iOS.

One, you can capture the entirety of a web page — not just what you can see on the screen right now, but all of it, from top to bottom, as if you’d stitched together lots of screenshots. Two, you can save these all-page screenshots as PDFs with active, selectable text and links.

Here’s how to make the most out of PDF screenshots in iOS 13.

How to merge PDFs on iOS

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This is how we used to merge PDFs before computers.
This is how we used to merge PDFs before computers.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Contrary to what you might expect, merging PDFs is easier on your iPhone than on your Mac. On the desktop, you first need to open both PDFs in the Preview app, and then work out how to combine the two of them. On the iPhone or iPad, you can select your PDFs in the Files app (or in the Mail app, or anywhere else you find them), and use a quick shortcut to combine and save them in one go.

It’s instant, foolproof, and Just Works™. Let’s see just how easy it is to merge PDFs on iOS.

How to translate any PDF or sheet of paper

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If you can read it, you can translate it.
If you can read it, you can translate it.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

How do you translate a PDF? Maybe you scanned a page from a friend’s German cake recipes book. Or perhaps you’re living abroad and you have no idea what the police just made you sign. There are plenty of ways to translate PDFs and text, but most of them involve either A) Microsoft Word or B) uploading your private documents to a cloud service to be read.

Today we’ll see how to quickly scan a paper document, then translate its written text into English. You’ll be amazed at how fast it is.

How to sign PDFs on your iPhone or iPad

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Apple Pencil vs dumb stylus: This old Wacom Bamboo is more than enough
Signing and returning PDFs on your iPhone is easier than doing it on paper.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Scenario: Your divorce papers finally came through, and you can’t wait to sign the things. The trouble is, your spouse already took your office and your home, and you have no way to print or fax the documents.  Or perhaps you need to stick your autograph on some other document, but all you have is your iPhone or iPad.

No worries. With recent versions of iOS, it’s easier than ever to sign a PDF form and return it to the sender. In fact, you don’t even need to leave the Mail app to do it.

Three ways to save web pages as read-later PDFs on iOS

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A metaphorical view of my badly-organized PDFs
A metaphorical view of my badly-organized PDFs
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

With the demise of Instapaper — in Europe at least — you may be looking for a good way to save web pages for offline reading. The obvious built-in tool for this is Safari’s Reading list, but it’s very limited. Instead, consider turning the web page into a PDF. This lets you read the page anywhere, as well as mark it up with highlights, and search its entire content using Spotlight.

The thing is, there are three different way to save a webpage as a PDF, all of them built-in to iOS. Let’s take a look at how to use them, what the differences are, and which one is best for you.

PDF Viewer supercharges the native iOS 11 Files browser [Review]

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PDF Viewer uses iOS 11's Files browser to do its work.
PDF Viewer uses iOS 11's Files browser to do its work.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

A month or so back I was searching for a PDF app that would use the native Files browser on the iPad, but add features not available in Files app’s built-in PDF viewer. The result of that search was PDF Viewer, an app that is almost impossible to find on Google, but which is simple enough to be perfect for many people.

New software turns PDFs to putty in your hands

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PDFelement 6 makes working with PDFs simple.
PDFelement 6 makes working with PDFs simple.
Image: Wondershare

This post is brought to you by PDFelement 6.

If you work at a computer a lot, PDFs are a part of daily life. It makes sense — PDFs are reliable and look great on a wide range of devices, making them ideal for a huge number of uses. But since the text, images and other information comes baked into the document, not unlike a printed page, doing anything but reading a PDF can be tricky.

Apple Releases iBooks 1.2 Adds PDF Printing and Collections

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post-73252-image-ccda40f31e5fa0e56ff7f92e7f912510-jpg

Apple has released an updated version of iBooks, version 1.2, introduces PDF printing and Collections. Collections allow you to organize your books and PDFs.

The app is now able to provide better graphics support for children’s books and there is even an option that will allow you to display more words per page for devices with smaller screens like the iPhone and iPod touch.

It’s available now, for iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad via updates in the iTunes App Store app or grab a copy here.

Check out the iPhone 4 screen shots after the jump.