Google Chrome Built-In PDF Reader

          Most people don’t stop to think about the PDF reader they install – they just install Adobe Reader. Adobe’s PDF Reader isn’t the only option, though – there are quite a few high-quality, free PDF viewers available for Windows.If you’re using Google Chrome, you already have a PDF reader. It’s not feature-packed, but it’s a quick, minimal way to read PDF documents in your browser without installing and launching a separate application. 

          It makes PDFs look like any other web page, aside from a toolbar that appears when you hover your cursor over the document.Chrome comes with a built-in PDF Viewer tool that can be used to do a lot more than just read PDF files. Sure, it’s not as powerful as Windows programs like PDFSam and there are a few cool apps to annotate PDFs online. Still, as a quick-fix solution, Chrome is perfect.

           You first need to check if you have enabled PDF Viewer in Chrome. Head to the Omnibox and type:chrome://plugins

       If you see ‘Disable’ as a link under Chrome PDF Viewer, it’s already switched on. If you see ‘Enable’, click that and restart the browser.

       The Chrome PDF Viewer can be used to read any PDF, whether online or stored locally. For local files, open a new tab and drag-and-drop the document.With that out of the way, let’s see what you can do with this handy utility.

Split Pages

     Suppose you have a PDF file with 20 pages and you only want pages 2, 7, 11, 12 and 13. Open the file in Chrome PDF Viewer and take your mouse to the bottom-right corner. A toolbar will show up with options to fit the page horizontally or vertically, zoom in and out, save the PDF and Print Options. Click the last icon, i.e. Print Options.

     Hit the ‘Change’ button under Destination and in the menu, choose ‘Save As PDF’. Now, in the Pages, choose the second option and type the numbers of the pages you want in the new document, separating them by commas and specifying ranges with a dash. So for example, for the above document, you would write “2, 7, 11-13″.Click the Save button and download a new PDF to your hard drive which has only the pages you want.

Fill Out Forms And Save Them

      If you need to fill out a PDF form — which most government documents require you to — it can be done easily through the Chrome PDF Viewer. Not only is it faster, but it also looks more professional.

    Open the fillable form in Chrome and just start typing. It really is as simple as that. Chrome smartly detects spaces to fill out and lets you type there. However, this isn’t a foolproof method and there are some forms Chrome can’t detect. For example, I tried it with an Indian railway form where half the text was in Hindi and it didn’t work.

      Still, the bigger problem is saving the form after you are done. If you hit the “Save” button in the toolbar, it will just save the blank original PDF without the text you entered. To save the text, you need to again hit the Print option, choose ‘Save as PDF’ in the Destination and click Save to download the filled out form.

Save Web Pages As PDF

     The Chrome PDF Viewer can also be used to save any web page as a PDF file for you to read later or offline.

      Hit Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P on a Mac) to bring up the Print options. Choose the pages you want, layout (portrait/landscape), whether you want to include headers, footers, background colours and images, and set the margin. The ability to set custom margins is a pretty cool feature here.Once you’re done, again, use the Print -> Save as PDF -> Save method to download the file to your hard drive.

The One Missing Feature

      As you can see, the Chrome PDF Viewer has a lot of functionality you probably didn’t know about for something that comes packaged as a core feature of product. But there’s still one thing I wish it had: the ability the sign documents. I love that I can fill out forms, but so many of them require a signature and I still have to turn to a solution like HelloSign for that.