Which PDF Tool Do I Need?

The seven PDF tools have names that describe what they do, but not always which one fits a specific situation. These are five real situations and the tool that fits each:

• You have a 40-page scanned contract and only need pages 12 through 15 for a colleague. Open it in Extract PDF Pages and type 12-15 as the page range. You get one new 4-page PDF; the original 40-page file is untouched.
• You have one long report and need it split into a separate file per chapter. Use Split PDF with several ranges at once, such as 1-8, 9-20, 21-30 — each range becomes its own file in one pass.
• You need to quote a paragraph from a PDF report in an email. Use PDF Text Extractor. This only works if the PDF already has real, selectable text — a report that is actually a scan (a photo of each page) has no text layer, and the tool will honestly tell you nothing was found rather than guessing.
• You need the chart on page 3 as its own image file. Use PDF Image Extractor. It pulls out the embedded picture itself, not a screenshot of the page around it — if the "chart" is actually drawn with vector lines and text rather than a picture, there is no embedded image for it to find.
• Before sending a PDF outside your company, you want your name and software details out of the file properties. Use PDF Metadata Remover. It clears the standard document fields; it does not touch the visible page content.

Some real tasks need more than one tool, one after the other — and which order matters depends on how each tool actually builds its result. Extract PDF Pages, Split PDF and Merge PDF all build a brand-new file from scratch rather than editing your original, so a file made with any of the three doesn't carry over the source document's Title or Author at all — only generic program information is set. Rotate PDF works differently: it keeps working from your original file and only changes each page's orientation, so it keeps whatever Title, Author or other details that file already had.

That means if you have a sideways-scanned report and want your name out of the file properties before sharing it, rotating first and then running PDF Metadata Remover on the result — rather than the other way around — is the version that actually needs both steps. If instead you're using Extract PDF Pages, Split PDF or Merge PDF, the original author and title are already gone from the result without an extra step — worth knowing either way.

Being clear about the edges matters as much as the tools themselves. A password on the source file rules all seven out before you even get to choosing between them — a locked PDF is reported as locked, not worked around. None of them reduce a PDF's file size the way an image compressor reduces a photo's — there isn't a general-purpose "make this PDF smaller" tool in this set. And extracting or rotating pages never re-reads or re-recognizes the content on them: pages are copied and repositioned exactly as they are, not analyzed.