How To Work With PDFs On An iPhone or iPad

You can create, view, mark up, merge and split PDF documents on an iPhone and iPad with no special apps needed. If you know where to look, you can do almost everything in the Files app, but the Books app may be the better way to view PDFs.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create, view, merge, split, and annotate PDF documents on your iPhone or iPad. 
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So working with PDF documents isn't as straight forward on an iPhone or iPad as it is on the Mac. On the Mac you've got a dedicated app, Preview, that pretty much takes care of what most people need from PDF's. There is no Preview App on the iPhone. But there is a Files App which is similar to the Finder and it turns out that the Files App can do a lot of things with PDF's as well. 
First, let's create a PDF. You can create a PDF from almost anywhere on the iPhone. Now you may know that you can do this on the Mac because you can Print and then Save As PDF. So even if the app doesn't have a native PDF functionality you can still do it. You have the same thing on the iPhone but it's kind of hidden. 
So here I am on a webpage in Safari. You can be using any app. You can be in Mail, you can be in some other app showing text. Whatever it is as long as you can Print you should be able to create a PDF. So I'm going to go and tap on this button here to Share it and one of the options down here is Print. I'm going to go to Print. You're still not going to see any PDF functionality here. But if you take two fingers and you move them over the previews at the bottom and pinch outward it will expand the preview to full screen. Once its full screen it's basically acting like a PDF and you can tap here. Then you Save to File. Then Save and you're going to get a PDF. Now if I look in the Files App is that same folder where I saved it to I can see there's a PDF of that entire webpage. So viewing PDF's is a matter of just using the Files App. I have a bunch of PDF's in here and to view them all I need to do is tap on them in the Files App. The Files App turns into this little PDF viewer here.
Then this is actually where you can mark up a PDF as well. You can tap up there and you get Markup Tools. Now you can actually markup with all sorts of different things including text, shapes, arrows, everything. 
Now what about merging two PDF's. It doesn't seem like there is any functionality for that either. But it's right here in the Files App. All you need to do is tap up here and now you can select and select say these three documents right here. Now if I tap down here one of the things I can do is create PDF. So it's going to create a new PDF that has all three of those things in there. So I look in here and here is that newsletter, followed by the report, followed by the document after it. All merged together in one new PDF. 
How about splitting PDF's. Here I've got a long PDF and let's say I only want to have a few of these pages brought into a new document. Well what I can do here is go to Print, just like I did before to create a PDF. You see here I can create a range, and it says all eight pages. I can actually click in there and change that range. But I could also select pages down here. So let's exclude the first page. Let's exclude the third page. Lets exclude pages 6, 7, 8. Now I've just got pages 2, 4, and 5. Now I can Print and then Save To Files and it will allow me to Save this document here as a New Document. You could see right here I've got Sample Text 2 now and it just has those three pages that I wanted to save. 
So, of course, you can combine that technique with the merge technique if you want to take several different things out of some PDF's, create separate files from them and then merge them all into one new PDF. 
There's another thing I want to show you. The Files App isn't the only place where you can view PDF's. You can also do it in the Books App. Now the Books App, of course, is where you can buy books from Apple. You can download some for free. You can add your own books to it as well. You can also do audiobooks in the Books App. But you can also use it as a PDF viewer. So even if you don't use Books for anything else it's a handy place to store PDF's and have a nice way to read them. 
So I'm going to go into this PDF right here. Then I'm going to share it here. One of the places I could go from here is Books. So I'll tap Books right there and it will bring it into the Books App. You can see I've got the rest of my books there as well. It's now part of my Books Library. Now I have a nice way to read this PDF in the Books App. There are also a variety of different tools up here. I can Search in the PDF. I can mark it up. I can go into a Table of Contents like this. In this case it's just going to show me thumbnails. I've got bookmarks that I can set here. So there's a lot of PDF reading functionality in the Books App. If you use a lot of PDF's you shouldn't overlook the Books App. Give it a try and you may find you like it better than any other solution for viewing PDF's. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

How To Work With PDFs On An iPhone or iPad

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