By 
PDF reading is a top choice for minimalist note-takers, and there are several reasons why PDFelement could be your go-to PDF reader. For a deeper understanding, you can check out our full review of the app.
Sometimes, annotations alone aren’t enough. With PDF editing, you can modify the content of a PDF directly on your iPad, whether you need to remove or add text. PDFelement offers a few text formatting options to customize your document.
You can also edit images within your PDFs. By tapping on an image, you get options to replace it with one from your Photos, resize, rotate, or crop it. If needed, you can even extract images and save them to your Photos library.
If you have documents that need protection or branding, you can easily add a watermark with PDFelement. The app allows you to customize the watermark’s size, color, opacity, rotation, and position. You can even tile the watermark in different concentrations, ranging from 1×1 to 10×10.
PDFelement can also remove certain watermarks, depending on where they were created. For instance, it had no trouble removing a watermark created in Adobe Acrobat Reader, but it couldn’t remove one from Microsoft Word. We’re still investigating this.
PDF files are often large, but PDFelement lets you optimize them. You can name the optimized version, choose a save location, and select from five quality levels. The app will show you how much the file size will be reduced and its final size. The documents we optimized retained their resolution impressively well, with file size reductions ranging from 10% to 34%, depending on the document.
Most PDF editors save digital signatures when you fill out forms, but that can be risky if your device falls into the wrong hands. PDFelement shares this concern and offers an option to add a temporary signature that isn’t saved, making it the best choice for secure digital signatures.
You can also compress multiple documents into a zip file, a feature not commonly found in PDF readers. The app also unzips files, although it doesn’t support RAR files.
In PDFelement, you can merge multiple documents, arranging them in the desired order. Once merged, the app takes you directly to the final document. There’s no limit to how many documents you can merge at once.
The app also allows you to convert PDFs into 11 different formats, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Images, Text, HTML, and RTF. While it excels in most formats, converting to Excel can be tricky, so we wouldn’t rely on it for that. Still, the variety of formats is impressive.
You can set a password for your documents in PDFelement, though it doesn’t support Touch/Face ID for unlocking. While this might seem like extra work, it’s a useful precaution for protecting important files. If someone bypasses your iPad password, they would still need this additional password to access your documents. Keep in mind that there’s no way to recover a forgotten password, so how you feel about this might depend on the sensitivity of the documents you’re locking.
PDFelement is available on iOS/iPadOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you can upload documents to the PDFelement-iCloud folder for access across multiple devices, giving you control over which documents sync and which stay local.
PDF editors for the iPad are generally expensive, but PDFelement stands out with a one-time purchase option, though a subscription model is also available if you prefer. Opting for the one-time payment could save you a lot of money in the long run. The app also offers team and education packages, which are worth exploring.
There are a few reasons PDFelement might be challenging to use, as it’s still missing some critical features. However, it’s a minimalist PDF editor and one of the most affordable options for the iPad. It’s definitely worth considering if you’re looking for a PDF editor to fit your workflow. For a more detailed look at what PDFelement can do, check out our complete review.
