Sometimes nothing needs transforming: the document just needs opening — and working on. You open it in the browser, search for a word, jump to a page, copy the text, highlight the passage that matters. The file goes nowhere.
Drag the PDF onto the page and start reading.
Search for a word in the text, jump to a page, zoom in where needed.
Copy what you need to the clipboard, or save the whole document as a .txt file.
Highlight in eight colours, add notes and text boxes, draw freehand. On saving, they become real PDF annotations: they open in Acrobat and can be removed.
From here you move to another tool without loading the document again.
The file does not leave your device. Thirty-three tools out of forty.
No: reading happens in the browser you are already using. That helps on a computer that is not yours, or when you do not want to install software to open a single document.
No. Pages are rendered on your device: the file is not uploaded to Plicum servers. That holds for confidential documents you open only to consult.
Yes: select and copy as on any page, or press “Copy the text” and take the whole document — including pages you have not scrolled to yet. There is also a .txt export, with page numbers, which is what you need in order to cite.
Yes, and they stay REMOVABLE: they are written as real PDF annotations, not flattened onto the page. Acrobat shows them in its comment panel, and whoever receives the document can delete them. The original file is not touched: a new one is produced.
Only if the scan already contains a text layer. If it is a pure image, OCR comes first: from there the document becomes searchable.
It opens in your browser, nothing to install. Five operations a day are free, with no payment details.