By Nelson Garcia 

If you do not have Adobe Acrobat, PDFgear is an alternative free PDF reader and editor.  It works with Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android and web browsers. It will let you edit, convert, annotate, organize, and sign PDF documents.

Here are some of the things you can do with PDFgear:

Edit: text, images, links, and fields—similar to editing in Word
Annotate and mark: highlight, underline, strikethrough, add sticky notes, comments, stamps, and shapes
Password protect: you can add a password to a PDF
Convert: you can convert PDFs to and from formats like Word, Excel, etc.
OCR: you can extract selected text
Manage forms: you can fill out forms, make new forms, and add electronic signatures
Organize pages: you can merge, split, compress, crop, rotate, and rearrange pages

The ability to convert your file type—ie from PDF to word or vice versa, is available as soon as you open the program. You can also make a new PDF file from the opening page, or open an existing PDF file using the buttons on the left.  

When you open a file, it automatically opens to the Home tab or Home page.

Here you’ll find the OCR feature.  Unfortunately, the OCR feature is not that robust.  It will not OCR the entire document automatically.  You will need to drag an area of the document that you want to OCR. This means that on a multipage document, you would need to do each page separately.  See below.

 From here, you can “Copy text to clipboard”.  It will not create an OCR layer over the document like you would in Adobe Acrobat.  For this reason, we suggest only working with OCR’d documents in PDFgear.

Other features on the Home tab are the Auto Scroll feature and the Slide Show feature. The Slide Show feature allows you to display the document in presentation mode.  This could be a handy feature in the courtroom.

PDFgear also offers an array of online tools without installing the program. Although they claim that the online tools process files locally in your browser, it is not recommended to upload possible sensitive content. Use the local client instead.

For more information or to start using PDFgear, visit their official website: https://www.pdfgear.com/.