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I was downloading a government form the other day and it told me that I would need the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Umm, I don’t think so. Adobe is a corporation whose tools I avoid like the plague. Also, a PDF should not need a proprietary reader in order to be accessed. Despite the marketing, portable document format is a standard (but not a freely accessible one). I’ve been stumbling upon some new PDF options recently that make me hopeful that, eventually, PDF will shed the Adobe tie-in.

I have posted before about other PDF tools, including PDF editors that are competitive alternatives to Adobe. In general, I use the web browser’s built in reader whenever I can. It is simple and doesn’t require a second application. Chrome-based browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have a PDF option in their settings. Mozilla Firefox does too, but it’s more a choice to tell it which application, your web browser or your PDF reader, to use and is located under Search Results. You do not need to have a PDF reader to use this functionality.

A screenshot of a web browser settings page. It says Settings at the top and then All Permissions followed by text that says PDF documents. There are two options. One is to always download PDF files. The other is PDF view settings. Both have a toggle button on the right side. The one for the Always Download option is toggled on.
A screenshot of the Microsoft Edge settings page dealing with PDF document permissions.

I tend to stay away from PDFs. On the one hand, they are a universal format. On the other, they are not ones that allow much in the way of collaboration. If I am working with colleagues, I would prefer to share a Word document or PowerPoint slide deck from my OneDrive or SharePoint instance. In that way, we can work on the document and it stays in a single place. PDFs, while shareable, have tended to require being sent as email attachments, given the variety and incompatibility of commenting tools.

At the same time, now that I’m teaching a course with 60 students, there are 60 possible ways that people will retrieve those native format files, like docx or pptx. PDF may be a simpler solution when I am just broadcasting information. I have started to convert my slide decks into PDFs so that they can be viewed easily on any device. Since I tend not to use animations or other presentation functionality—on purpose, given the context—the slide deck loses nothing by being shared as a flat PDF file.

What I have found is that sometimes I’m starting with a PDF and ending with a PDF but need to work on the file in between.

Microsoft Word the PDF Editor

I stumbled on this one by accident. I think what had happened is that I was changing PDF readers. I wanted to open PDFs in the new reader and so I right-clicked on the new PDF I had downloaded. I selected Microsoft Window’s Open with… option on that menu and saw a list of applications that I could invoke. The one I wanted wasn’t there so I clicked the Choose another app option and Microsoft Word was listed.

Wut?

So I selected it to see what would happen. The result was pretty great. I regularly use it now for opening up PDFs that I want to edit. Unlike the Adobe Acrobat Editor function, which converts each document element into a text box, Microsoft Word opens the document (if it can open it) as a Word document.

Now I know that you can just open Microsoft Word, navigate to the folder with the PDF in it, and select it. No need for the rigamarole around the right-click menu. Also, the right-click menu approach never updates to show Microsoft Word as one of your regular apps for opening PDFs, so this can be a faster route.

Here’s an example of a US government form converted from PDF to Microsoft Word by just choosing to open it.

A screenshot showing Microsoft Word's application menus and buttons at the top, on the so-called Ribbon. In the space below is a representation of a document. It is a privacy act waiver with a title that starts "Written Consent to the Release of Personal Information" and followed by more text.
A screenshot of DS550, the U.S. government Privacy Act Waiver.

If there is interactivity built into the form, this method will strip it out. I looked at forms from the US courts, and from state courts including North Dakota, Illinois, and Iowa. All of them were either easy to paste into Word or, more commonly, had form fields available that eliminate the need to convert the file to a word processed format.

In other jurisdictions, you may find that pleadings or other documents are provided as templates but are not in an editable format. Take this expedited foreclosure form from Texas, for example. The PDF shows how the document should be formatted but does not allow the information to be inputted. Once you open it in Microsoft Word, though, you can work on the document directly.

A screenshot of Microsoft Word, with part of the Ribbon visible above the representation of the document. The document has a case style at the top, starting with the words Cause Number and then terminology like In Re: Order for Foreclosure and space for the names of the parties to this legal action. There are blue lines overlaying some of the text, showing that Microsoft Word is automatically alerting about grammar and layout problems.
Screenshot of a Texas court form converted into a Microsoft Word document.

This isn’t going to work with every PDF. You may need to run a PDF through an optical character recognition tool (OCR) to convert an image-based PDF into readable text. Word may handle that but I have not tried it yet.

Blackboard Ally

I am a pretty heavy user of the I Love PDF website when I need to split PDFs or merge them or otherwise manipulate a bunch of pages. I now have an Adobe license at work so I can do some of this, but I still find I Love PDF to be more intuitive for the functions I need.

When I started teaching a class this semester, though, I was introduced to Blackboard Ally, a little utility for file format management. Think Zamzar but without the advertising. It requires you to type in a Blackboard institution name but does not otherwise seem to validate the information.

The thing I like about it is that it will ingest a bunch of common file formats and then export them into ones that I’m less familiar seeing: Braille and audio MP3 and ePub, for example. It is a useful tool for bringing forward old PDFs that may need a different format for a new life.

A screenshot of a web page that says Blackboard Ally at the top left. In the center is a dialog box with choices for file format types, including epub, braille, and html. At the bottom right is a black button that says download.
A screenshot of the web page for Ally, showing the download options for an uploaded PDF.

Let’s say, for example, you have a publication you created and that was published only in a PDF format. You have lost the original, editable document. You could pull it into Microsoft Word. But if you are planning to convert it into a web page or an eBook, you could skip that intermediate step and convert it directly to your final, editable format.

I’m particularly curious about the audio format. We are awash these days with artificial intelligence audiobook generators. Is this audio like that? Or are they using a standard voice to generate all MP3s? The benefit of an audio book is that it should, in theory, get all the words right. As opposed to, say, uploading an audio file and having the resulting text (whether a transcript or closed captioning) filled with homonyms that distort the meaning of the words.

I’ve only played around with this a little bit. If you upload a PDF, naturally there is no PDF output option. If you upload a Microsoft Word document, though, it will offer a tagged PDF output. This means that the outcome will be highly dependent on the effort that the author put in to making the document accessible.

It is great to have more flexibility around PDF tools. They remain a mainstay of information sharing in the legal profession and beyond. It’s disappointing that there are organizations perpetuating Adobe’s importance or requiring a specific product in order to interact with a government document. Hopefully we will see continued efforts to make PDFs simply another web-native format like HTML.