The Sejda PDF Blog

We’re added a few new options to our JPG to PDF converter.

JPG is the most popular image format out there, but most of the image formats are supported: png, gif, tiff or bmp all work fine.

Configurable Page Size 

If the default A4 page size is not a good fit, you can now choose another page size or have it fit the image size. 

Configurable Page Orientation

By default we’ll auto detect based on the image dimensions if portrait or landscape matches better and use that.

If for some reason that’s not a good fit for you, a specific page orientation can be selected.

Margin around the image

By default no margin is added, so the image will fill the whole page space available. 

Sometimes its handy to add a small whitespace border around the image. This can be configured as a small margin (0.5 inch) or a larger margin (1 inch).

Reorder pages or images

If the images are not in the correct order just yet, you can reorder them by dragging the pages to the correct location.

Want to add more images? Just drag and drop files from your computer to the web browser page.

Give it a try and let us know if you have any ideas for improvement: https://www.sejda.com/jpg-to-pdf

Compress images for a smaller PDF

Images, especially scans, are usually large, so the resulting PDF will have a large size as well.

Need a smaller PDF size, to upload to an online application form or send by email? Compress you PDF resulting file using our PDF compressor.

We’ve released a new tool: converting PDF documents to grayscale.

What it does is it converts all text and images inside the PDF to grayscale.

In case you’re not sure what grayscale means, it’s something that used to be in full colours and is now represented by a range of grey shades from white to black, as used in a monochrome display.

Use less (colour) ink when printing

The most common reason for converting a PDF document to grayscale is to consume no coloured ink when printing it.

Offset printing

One of the tool features is that it can convert text to grayscale or simply black. This is handy when preparing a PDF document for offset printing.

Another feature allows skipping images altogether, leaving them in full colour, while converting to grayscale (or black) the text contents.

https://www.sejda.com/grayscale-pdf

We’ve release a few new tools recently, one of them being a HTML to PDF converter.

It’s currently in BETA, which means you might encounter an occasional bug or two. Also we’d love your thoughts on what features we should add.

So let’s learn more about the features.

Looks exactly like in your browser

What you see in your browser is exactly what you get in your PDF.  No exceptions. Go ahead, give it a try.

One single (looong) page

When you typically try to Print to PDF from your browser you get a document with multiple pages. 

The web contents is broken down into multiple pages. That’s fine for printing on paper, but not so great for other purposes.

We chose to default to a single long page without breaking down the web content.

Convert multiple pages in one go

Just paste multiple URLs, one per line and they will all be converted to a separate PDF file and served back to you in a compressed zip document.

https://www.sejda.com/html-to-pdf

Happy PDF crunching! 

We’ve updated our Compress PDF tool with two more options that you might find useful.

Compress images to grayscale

When we’re compressing a PDF document most of the times the dramatic reduction in file size comes from optimising the images inside.

Most of the times this is done by scaling down high resolution images to a lower yet reasonable quality.

Most of the times images can be further reduced in size by converting them from colour to grayscale. Here’s an example of a grayscale conversion: 

Here’s how to use this option when compressing PDF files:

Click More options

Select Image conversion: Grayscale

Compress PDF with high resolution images

This is interesting for scenarios where your PDF document contains high resolution images (eg: 720 ppi), like an architecture portfolio for example. 

You’d like to keep these images in their high resolution, but still compress the PDF document if possible.

There’s now a new option that, when selected, will make sure the images don’t lose their high resolution.

Click More options

Select Image resolution: 720 ppi

https://www.sejda.com/compress-pdf

We’ve all been there: filling an online application form, having to supply documents along with the application form.

The constraints are usually that a single file is uploaded containing all the personal details: the filled in forms, the supporting scanned documents, everything. Usually there’s also a file size limit of 5Mb.

We’ll talk about how to do this as easy as possible. First, let’s break down the steps that are usually required.

Filling forms

You can fill forms using Adobe’s Reader or Sejda’s PDF Editor. 

Scanning documents

For best result one would should use a scanner. Most printers these days have a scan function built-in.

But what if you don’t have a printer around you. No problem, you can use your mobile phone’s camera to scan your documents. 

Place the documents on a table, white background works best, and take a picture of each page from right above it, making sure there’s plenty of light and the document is properly visible in the result.

Merging documents

So now we have a filled out form, in PDF format, and a few scanned documents, all images.

One cumbersome way to merge them all is to first convert all scanned images to a PDF document, and then to merge the PDFs into a single file.

Sejda’s PDF Merge accepts both images and PDF files and will do the conversion automatically, so it’s simpler.

Compressing documents

We now have a single PDF file, but it’s 20MB in size and the online application page won’t accept it. We can compress the PDF file so all the scanned images inside will be optimised to be smaller yet keep a good quality.

Ok, now the merged file has shrinked dramatically in size and we can upload it and complete the online application. Whew, that was a lot of work!

Scanning, merging, compressing all in one simple step

Scanning, merging, compressing, a lot of steps and sometimes it can be technically challenging. 

It seemed there should be a better way. So we built a better way.

We’ve combined all these steps in a simple flow, that works like this:

Scan documents with your mobile's camera.

Attach them to an email sent to [email protected].

Get an automated reply with your merged PDF file in seconds.

We'll compress the images so your merged PDF is super tiny in size and can be uploaded to your online application. Your files stay private and are automatically deleted after being processed. 

We hope this will dramatically help everybody that’s preparing documents for an online application form.

Love to hear your feedback on this in the comments below. And success with your online application form!

I want to share with you one of the latest updates to our PDF Editor: drawing signatures and uploading signatures. 

Before you could already Sign PDF files by typing your name and a signature was generated for you.

Now signatures can be added to a PDF document in two new ways: drawing the signature or uploading an image with the signature.

It’s now easier to add a PDF signature to your document without printing, signing and then scanning.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Release Notes is our update that highlights the recent product improvements we’ve made, so you can easily stay up to date on what’s new. Here’s what we launched recently.

Repair PDF documents

We released a new Repair PDF task that can help recover data from a corrupted or damaged PDF document.

A best effort attempt is made to find the PDF document structure and recover any pages that can be discovered.

Repair PDF documents online

Watermark PDF documents

There’s now an easy way to add text or image based watermarks to PDF documents online.

Type the text you want to watermark with, such as “Draft” or “Confidential”, choose a color, resize and rotate to a best fit, move to place in page.

Images are also supported as watermark source, simply browse for a local image to apply it.

Watermark PDF Online

Resize PDF pages

Do you need to add PDF page margins and padding to an existing document? 

Do you have a document where some pages are A4 and others are A3 or a custom size and need to resize them to a consistent size?

Do you just want to downscale a A3 PDF document so that all pages are A4?

The Resize PDF pages task can help with that.

 Hello folks,

We’re happy to announce a new feature added to our online PDF converter.

You can now create a PDF document from one or multiple image files. We support many popular image formats, such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.

Images are resized and scaled to best fit the resulting A4 sized PDF document.

Give it a try: Convert JPG to PDF Online

Is your favourite image format not supported? Please let us know and we’ll try to add support for it.

Hello,

We’ve just added a new feature: removing pages from a PDF document.

It should be very quick and simple to use.

Upload you PDF document and then select the PDF pages you want to remove. Click Delete pages and wait for the task to complete, then download your updated document.

Hello folks,

We’ve been busy working on a new set of features for Sejda PDF: converting to and from PDF to Office formats.

Convert PDF to Word

We can help with converting PDF documents to Word format (.docx). Results are optimised for legibility, not for fidelity to the original layout. OCR for scans is not yet supported.

The reverse action, converting Word documents to PDF is also available.

Converting PDF to Excel

We have added a task that converts a PDF document containing tabular data to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It detects and extracts tables and other forms of data and converts them to comma separated values (.csv) that is MS Excel compatible.

Release Notes is our monthly update that highlights the recent product improvements we’ve made, so you can easily stay up to date on what’s new. Here's what we launched in April.

Connected tasks

Let’s say you want to merge few PDF files and then rotate some of the pages, and compress the PDF file at the end.

Before you’d have to download the result from one task and re-upload it to the next. We’re trying to make workflows as smooth as possible, so we’ve connected the result from our task to the next.

Rename results before saving to Dropbox or Google Drive

Before you would have to first save the file to Dropbox, then go in your Dropbox and rename it. We’ve simplified this, now you can rename your file right from the results page.

Output filename patterns are remembered

Small things make a big difference. If you’re doing the same task twice, and you’ve configured your output filename patterns for the first task, most likely you’ll want to do the same second time as well. We’re making things easier, remembering your settings so second time you don’t have to re-configure them.

Drag multiple pages at once when combining and reordering

When merging multiple files and reordering their pages it’s helpful sometimes to re-arrange multiple pages at once. That’s now simple: select multiple pages and then drag and drop them all at once to the new location. Deleting pages is now more intuitive: a handy delete button reveals itself when you hover on the page thumbnails. If you’ve got multiple pages selected, it will ask you if you want to remove them all.

Better fit for smaller monitors

We’ve tweaked the design to better suite smaller monitors and optimise for larger area for page thumbnails.

Added Crop PDF feature

We’ve added a new task to our portfolio: cropping PDF files. Easily trim PDF margins, change PDF page size.

We’ve very happy to announce we’re improving our product with a new feature: editing PDF files online.

PDF Editor For The Web

With our Online PDF Editor you can add text to an existing PDF file, add images, insert new pages or delete existing ones and highlight text.

It’s as usual free to edit PDF files within the free user’s limits that apply to the rest of the website.

We have a few more features planned for the PDF editor, including:

adding comments

rotating pages

redacting text

adding geometric shapes

form fields

Give it a try: Edit PDF files online. We’d love your feedback in the comments below.

Hello folks,

We’re happy and proud to share with you that our Sejda PDF was featured on the homepage of Google Chrome Store

Hello everyone,

We’ve quietly released a PDF to Word converter, currently in beta.

Our conversion algorithm focuses on PDF text document, optimising for legibility when creating the output Word document. This means that some complex layouts that look great in the original PDF will not be preserved in the .doc. 

Text formatting and paragraphs, on the other hand, will be analysed and we’ll focus on preserving them. 

Repetitive headers and footers like “Page 1″, “Page 2″ or “Title here - Chapter one”, “Title here - Chapter two” will be removed.

Images are also preserved, and we do our best to place them in the correct text context.

Use-cases with good results for the PDF to DOC converter are scientific papers with or without double column layouts, web articles, books.

Task is currently in beta, so expect some documents to crash or return poor results. If you find this feature useful we’d love to hear more about what works well for you and what needs more improvement.

Greetings friends,

We’ve released a new feature on Sejda: cropping PDF files. This comes handy when you have a PDF document and you need to trim its margins or reduce the size of its pages.

Once you upload the PDF document you’ll see a preview where the first 30 pages are rendered transparently one on top of the other, so it’s easy to figure out what is the minimal bounding box that matches all of them.

Click and drag over the page preview to select the area to crop. Then click then “Crop PDF” button to continue.

Here’s a short animated walkthrough:

Hope you’ll find this feature useful. As always, we’d love to hear your opinion in the comments section below. Let us know if you find the feature useful or if there’s something we could improve!

We’ve had integration with Google Drive for a while now. Instead of uploading a local file, you could just pick it from your Google Drive.

But now things got even better. You can open your Google Drive files using Sejda right from the Google Drive UI. - Right click a Google Drive file, choose “Open with” - Then “Connect more apps” - Search for “Sejda” then press “ENTER” - Click “Connect”, then press “Ok” - Dismiss the modal window - Right click the file again and choose “Open with” > “Sejda”

Here’s a visual walk-through the whole flow:

And then, once your Sejda results are ready, you can now save them directly to Google Drive.

We think that’s going to make for a smoother integration with Google Drive. 

Cloud services for processing PDF files are great. No software to install, works quick and hassle free. You’re done in minutes.

Files are uploaded over a secure encrypted connection and are kept private. From a privacy perspective, this is good enough for most people.

Sometimes though you need to work with files that have special privacy considerations. Client data, confidential information that you are not allowed to upload to a third party service. Business files that cannot leave your network.

For these scenarios you need peace of mind privacy.

We’ve build Sejda Desktop for this. It works offline. Files are processed on your computer.

Sejda Desktop offers the same features as the cloud service: the same tasks, the same friendly user interface.

Online or on premise: it’s up to you. Sejda Desktop is available for all PRO subscribers.