itsual PDF – PDF Document Production & Manipulation
Overview
PDFs are the standard for final, portable documents. Create clean, professional PDFs and handle common manipulation tasks (merge, split, extract, watermark) reliably.
When to Use
- User requests a PDF deliverable (report, invoice, certificate, ebook, etc.)
- Need to combine, split, or reorder existing PDFs
- Text or table extraction from existing PDFs
- Adding page numbers, watermarks, or simple forms
Core Capabilities
- Generate well-laid-out PDFs from structured content
- Merge multiple PDFs into one
- Split or extract specific pages
- Rotate pages
- Add simple watermarks or headers/footers
- Extract text and tables (with OCR awareness when needed)
- Preserve or improve accessibility where practical
Design Principles for Generated PDFs
- Consistent margins and typography
- Clear visual hierarchy
- Sufficient contrast
- Logical reading order
- Embed fonts when necessary for portability
- Avoid unnecessary complexity that breaks across PDF readers
Verification
- PDF opens correctly in major readers (Adobe, Preview, browser, etc.)
- Text is selectable/searchable when expected
- Layout is intact (no clipped text or overlapping elements)
- Page count and order are correct after manipulations
- File size is reasonable for the content
Common Pitfalls
- Generating PDFs that only look correct in one viewer
- Losing text selectability through unnecessary rasterization
- Forgetting to handle page size and orientation consistently
- Poor handling of existing scanned/image-based PDFs