Tutorials – PDF Arranger

How to Password-Protect a PDF

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:44:00 +0000

Sometimes a PDF needs a lock: a contract, an invoice, a personal record you are sending or archiving. PDF Arranger can open password-protected PDFs and can encrypt the files it exports, using the Set Password step during export. This guide covers both directions — protecting a file, and honestly, what the protection does and does not do.

One boundary up front: PDF Arranger works with passwords you know. It opens a protected PDF after you enter its password, and it protects files with a password you choose. It is not a password cracker — a PDF whose password you do not know stays closed, and nothing here bypasses a document’s restrictions.

Before you start

Nothing you do in PDF Arranger changes the original file on disk. Every edit only takes effect when you export the result to a new PDF, which makes experimenting safe: if the output is not what you wanted, adjust the arrangement and export again.

Step by step: export a password-protected PDF

Open the PDF in PDF Arranger and make any page changes you need first — protection is applied at export, as the final step.
Start the Export. During export, open the Set Password dialog when prompted by the export options.
Enter the password you want the file to require, and confirm it carefully — there is no recovery if you mistype and forget it.
Finish the export. The exported PDF is encrypted (PDF encryption revision R=6, the modern AES-256-level scheme). Anyone opening it must enter the password first.
Test the exported file by opening it fresh and entering the password, before you delete or send anything.

How the password works in PDF Arranger

PDF Arranger keeps this simple: the password you set is used as both the user password and the owner password — there is one password, not two. Correspondingly, the app does not offer the fine-grained permission switches some editors have: you cannot set a separate password for opening versus printing, or allow opening but forbid copying, from this dialog. If you need per-permission control, that is a job for a full PDF editor; if you need “only people with the password can open this file”, Set Password does exactly that.

Saving a copy without a password

The reverse is straightforward and legitimate for your own files: open the protected PDF and enter its password when asked. Then export without setting a password in the Set Password step. The exported copy opens freely, while the original stays protected. This only works because you knew the password to open the file in the first place — it is re-saving your own document, not removing protection you are not entitled to.

Tips

Store the password somewhere safe (a password manager) before sharing the file; PDF Arranger cannot retrieve it for you later.
Send the password separately from the file — a different message or channel — or the protection adds little.
Protect the final version only. Re-exporting after every small edit means re-entering passwords and risks version mix-ups.

Choosing a password worth using

The protection is only as strong as the password behind it. Use a long, unique password — a phrase you do not reuse elsewhere — rather than a name, a date, or the document’s subject, all of which are guessable by anyone who knows what the file contains. A password manager can generate and store one for you, which also solves the delivery problem: you can retrieve it later when a recipient legitimately needs it re-sent. Finally, remember that an encrypted PDF still needs careful handling in transit; the password stops casual opening, and pairing it with sensible sharing — the right recipient, a separate channel for the password — is what makes the protection meaningful in practice.

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How to Import Images into a PDF

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:40:00 +0000

Photos of documents, scanned pages saved as images, screenshots, diagrams — sooner or later they all need to end up inside a PDF, in the right order and mixed with existing pages. PDF Arranger imports images as PDF pages, so a JPG scan and a regular PDF page become neighbours in one document you can then reorder, rotate, and export.

One dependency matters here: image import is powered by img2pdf, an optional companion tool. The transparent-image support in particular comes from img2pdf 0.4.2 or later, so if you work with PNGs that have transparency, an up-to-date img2pdf is what you want.

Before you start

You need PDF Arranger 1.14.0 (or a recent version) installed. If it is not on your computer yet, download PDF Arranger first — it is free, open source (GPL-3.0), and works entirely offline, so your files never leave your computer. On most packaged installs the import works out of the box; if image files are refused, installing or updating img2pdf is the fix.

Step by step: import images as pages

Open PDF Arranger, with or without an existing PDF loaded — images can start a new document or join an existing one.
Import the image files. Each image becomes a page in the arrangement, in the order imported.
Arrange the new pages. Drag them among the existing PDF pages, rotate any that came in sideways, and delete duplicates or failed shots.
Resize or crop if needed. Photo pages often have different dimensions from document pages; the Page Size dialog’s Fit to paper option makes them uniform before printing.
Export the combined document as a PDF.

Transparency and formats

With a current img2pdf, images with transparency are supported, so a PNG logo sheet or a transparent diagram keeps its transparent background as a page rather than being flattened onto white by an older conversion path. Everyday formats such as JPEG and PNG are the typical inputs; if a specialist format fails to import, converting it to PNG first with an image editor is the reliable workaround.

The reverse: explode a page into images

PDF Arranger also runs this in reverse with Explode into images: a page that contains images is split so each image becomes its own page. That is the quick way to pull the individual scans or photos back out of a combined page so you can reorder, delete, or export them separately.

Tips

Imported image pages are pictures, not searchable text — PDF Arranger has no OCR. If you need searchable scans, run OCR with a dedicated tool before or after assembling the PDF.
Keep the original image files if quality matters; exporting pages back out later will not exceed the quality you imported.

A worked example: phone photos to a clean PDF

A typical job: twelve photos of a paper form, taken on a phone, that must be submitted as one PDF. Import all twelve images; they arrive as twelve pages in shooting order. Two are sideways — rotate them. One is a duplicate of a page retaken for legibility — delete the blurrier copy. The photos are all slightly different sizes, so fit the pages to a single paper size for a tidy result. Export, and you have a submission-ready document. Note what did not happen: the text in the photos is still just pictures, so if the receiving system needs searchable text, OCR has to happen in a dedicated tool as a separate step.

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How to Add a Blank Page to a PDF

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:36:00 +0000

Blank pages do real work in a document: a cover before the first chapter, a separator between sections, an empty back page so a double-sided print starts the next chapter on the right side, or simply a placeholder where content will be added later. PDF Arranger can insert a blank page at any position, in the paper size you choose.

Because the blank is inserted into the arrangement rather than typed onto, it takes a second — and like every other edit here, it only becomes part of the file when you export.

Before you start

Step by step: insert a blank page

Open the PDF and decide where the blank page belongs.
Select the page next to the insertion point so PDF Arranger knows where in the sequence you are working.
Insert the blank page using the add blank page action. A dialog lets you choose the paper size for the new page.
Choose a size that matches its neighbours — the dialog offers the standard A-series sizes, A4 and A5 for most documents, up to the large A0–A2 sizes added in version 1.14.0, and down to A6. Matching sizes keep printing and on-screen paging consistent.
Move the blank page by dragging if it landed one position off, then export the document.

Good uses for blank pages

The most common pattern is duplex printing: chapters that must start on a right-hand (odd) page need a blank inserted when they would otherwise start on the back of the previous chapter. Separators are the other classic — a blank page signals a section break in packets assembled from many sources. And a blank first page works as a simple cover when the document will be printed and bound, keeping the first content page clean.

Tips

If the blank is a placeholder for a real page, you can later merge that page in and delete the blank, or paste content over it using the overlay features.
A blank page adds almost nothing to file size, so there is no cost to inserting one “just in case” before printing.
Check the page count parity after inserting blanks in booklet or duplex documents — one blank shifts every following page’s side.

Pairing blanks with duplex printing

The parity trick deserves one more look, because it is where blank pages earn their place. In a double-sided document, odd-numbered pages print on the fronts of sheets and even-numbered pages on the backs. If a chapter must open on a front — as readers expect — and it currently starts on an even page, inserting one blank page before it shifts the chapter to a front and pushes a blank back onto the previous chapter’s last sheet, which is exactly the layout printed books use. After inserting, flip through the following pages: every later chapter’s start side has flipped too, so check the whole document’s parity, not just the chapter you fixed, before exporting and printing.

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How to Edit PDF Metadata

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:32:00 +0000

A PDF’s metadata — its title, subject, and keywords — is what file managers, search tools, and PDF viewers display in document lists and properties panels. Files assembled from scans and merges often carry a scanner’s filename as their title, or nothing at all. PDF Arranger lets you edit the document properties directly, as part of the same session as your page work.

Be clear on what metadata is not: it is information about the document, not the text on its pages. PDF Arranger cannot change words in the document body — for that you would need a full PDF editor. What it edits, it edits properly and saves into the exported file.

Before you start

Step by step: edit the document properties

Open the PDF in PDF Arranger.
Open the document properties (metadata) dialog. The dialog shows the document’s current metadata fields.
Edit the fields you need. The editable metadata includes the Title (the name viewers show instead of the filename), the Subject (a short description of what the document covers), and Keywords (terms that help search tools find the file). The dialog also covers fields such as Producer and Creator information stored in the document’s XMP and document information data.
Confirm the changes and export the PDF. Metadata is written into the file on export, so exporting is what makes your edits permanent.
Reopen the exported file’s properties in your PDF viewer to verify the new title and fields appear as intended.

Writing metadata that helps

A good Title names the document the way a human would: “2026 Project Proposal — Final” beats “scan_final2”. Keep the Subject to one descriptive sentence, and choose Keywords you would actually search for later — a project name, a client, a document type. Consistent metadata across a folder of PDFs pays off every time you search it.

Tips

Set metadata after merging: a merged document inherits a mixed history, and a fresh title and subject make its origin clear.
Changing metadata does not alter page content, creation software records elsewhere in the file, or anything visible on the pages themselves.
If a field looks wrong after export, re-edit and export again — the original file is unchanged until you overwrite it.

When metadata matters most

Metadata earns its keep in shared folders and document libraries. When a team stores hundreds of PDFs, the title shown in a viewer or file manager is often the only label a colleague sees before opening the file, and search tools index the subject and keywords you set. A merged report exported straight from assembly may carry the first source file’s title, which can be actively misleading once the contents have grown. A thirty-second pass through the properties dialog — a clear title, a one-line subject, a handful of keywords — makes the finished document findable and self-explanatory for everyone who receives it, without touching a single page of content.

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How to Resize PDF Pages

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:28:00 +0000

Mixed page sizes are a quiet source of printing problems: a merged document with A4 text pages, a letter-size form, and an oversized diagram jumps around on screen and prints unpredictably. PDF Arranger’s Page Size dialog rescales pages — by percentage, by exact millimetres, or by fitting them to a standard paper size — so the whole document comes out uniform.

Resizing changes the page dimensions and scales the content to match. It does not compress the file, and it does not change the content itself; text stays text, and images keep their resolution relative to the new page size.

Before you start

Step by step: resize pages in the Page Size dialog

Open the PDF and select the pages to resize. Select all pages for a uniform document, or only the odd-sized ones.
Open the Page Size dialog for the selection.
Choose how to size the pages. Scale by a percentage (for example 70% to bring an A3 page down towards A4 proportions), enter target dimensions in millimetres for an exact result, or use Fit to paper to scale each page onto a standard paper size.
Pick the paper size if fitting. The dialog offers the standard A-series sizes; version 1.14.0 added the large A0, A1, and A2 sizes and moved paper sizes to the front of the dialog, alongside A3–A6 for everyday documents.
Apply and inspect a few pages at full size, then export.

Which method should you use?

Percentages are quickest when you only know a page is “about a third too big”. Millimetres are right when the output must match an exact trim size. Fit to paper is the safest default for mixed documents headed for a printer, because every page ends up on the same standard sheet, scaled to fit rather than cropped.

Tips

Resizing pages that contain links can cost you those links (and outlines may be lost) in the exported file. If the document is link-heavy and meant for screen use, check the exported copy before deleting anything.
Resize before generating a booklet, not after — imposition assumes uniform pages.
Pair resizing with cropping: crop white borders first, then fit to paper, for the largest, cleanest printed result.

A worked example

Take a merged application packet: A4 letters, a letter-size form from an overseas office, and an A3 site plan folded into the middle. Printed as-is, the packet scales unpredictably and the plan may be cut off. Select every page, open the Page Size dialog, and fit all pages to A4: the letters stay as they are, the form scales slightly, and the plan shrinks to a readable overview on a single sheet. If the plan must stay large, exclude it from the selection, fit the rest, and print the plan separately at its native size. Resizing by selection, rather than always globally, is what makes the tool practical on real-world mixed documents.

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How to Make a Booklet from a PDF

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:24:00 +0000

A booklet is not just a PDF printed smaller. For a stack of double-sided sheets to fold into a booklet that reads page 1, 2, 3 in order, the pages must be rearranged — the first sheet carries the last page beside the first, and so on. Doing that imposition by hand is error-prone; PDF Arranger’s Generate booklet does it automatically.

The same feature family works in reverse: if you have a PDF that is already imposed as booklet spreads (or scans of a folded booklet), splitting the booklet recovers normal, single pages in reading order.

Before you start

Step by step: generate a booklet

Open the finished PDF. Booklet generation should be the last step: complete all merging, reordering, and edits first, and make sure the pages are in normal reading order.
Select all pages in the document.
Apply Generate booklet. PDF Arranger rearranges the pages into booklet imposition, pairing pages so that printed, folded sheets read in sequence.
Export the booklet PDF under a new name, keeping your reading-order original untouched.
Print the exported file double-sided (see the printing notes below), fold the stack in half, and check the page sequence before stapling.

Splitting a booklet back into pages

If the process needs to run the other way — you received a booklet-imposed file, or scanned a physical booklet two pages at a time — open it, select the pages, and apply the split booklet operation. The spreads are separated and returned to single pages in reading order, ready for normal editing or merging.

Printing tips

Print double-sided and test with a small page count first (an 8-page document is ideal) to confirm your printer’s flip setting before committing a long booklet.
Keep the reading-order original. If the printed order is wrong, regenerate from the original rather than trying to fix the imposed file.
Outlines and links can be lost when generating or splitting a booklet. If the booklet is for print, that rarely matters; if it is also your screen copy, keep the original for that purpose.

Before you print a long booklet

For anything longer than a test booklet, print a signature — one folded group of sheets — first and check it thoroughly: are the front and back of each sheet paired correctly, does the fold produce consecutive pages, is any page upside down? Printer drivers differ in how they flip double-sided pages, and a five-minute test saves a wasted stack of paper. Also check your page count comfort: booklets consume pages in a fixed imposition rhythm, so a document whose length sits awkwardly may end with blank pages at the back, which is normal and, for notes pages, even useful. Finally, staple or bind only after the full stack is folded and checked in order.

If you generate booklets regularly, keep a tiny four-page test document on hand. Running it through your printer after any driver or settings change confirms the setup in seconds, before a real booklet is at stake.

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How to Delete or Duplicate PDF Pages

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:20:00 +0000

Almost every collected PDF carries a few pages nobody needs: the blank back of a title sheet, a duplicate scan, a cover page from a merge. The opposite problem exists too — sometimes one page, such as a form or a separator sheet, needs to appear several times. PDF Arranger’s delete and duplicate actions handle both in seconds.

As with every PDF Arranger edit, deleting a page only removes it from the arrangement in the window. Your original file keeps all of its pages until you deliberately export over a new file, so there is no risk in tidying aggressively.

Before you start

Step by step: delete pages

Open the PDF and find the page or pages to remove by their thumbnails.
Select the pages. Select a single page, a continuous range, or several separate pages. The selection tools can also pick all odd or all even pages, which is handy for removing scanner separator sheets.
Delete the selection. The pages disappear from the arrangement and the remaining pages close up in order.
Scan through the document once to confirm nothing wanted was caught in the selection, then export the cleaned document.

Step by step: duplicate a page

Select the page you want more copies of.
Apply Duplicate. A copy of the page is added to the arrangement; duplicate again if you need several copies.
Drag the copies into position if they are needed in different places — for example a form page repeated before each section.
Export the finished document.

Tips

Deleted the wrong page? Use Undo rather than starting over; the page returns to its old position.
Deleting pages is also the fastest way to split a document informally: delete everything except one section, export, then undo and repeat for the next section — though the dedicated split workflow is cleaner for many parts.
Duplicating is page-level copying: the copy is identical, and editing the content of one copy independently is not something PDF Arranger does.

Tidy first, export once

Page cleanup is most efficient as a single pass before you export anything else. Open the document, walk through the thumbnails from first to last, and delete as you go: blank backs, scanner test pages, the duplicate of page 12 where the feeder hiccuped. If a section needs a separator, duplicate an existing divider page and drag the copy into place during the same pass. Only when the thumbnail strip shows exactly the document you want — no more, no less — do you export. Working this way means one export produces the final file, instead of a chain of half-cleaned versions with names like final, final2, and final-really. It also makes the check easy: the page count in the window should match the count you expect before you save.

One last habit worth building: after exporting the cleaned file, keep the original somewhere separate for a while. Page removal is easy to redo from the original, but impossible to undo from the exported file alone.

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How to Crop PDF Pages

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:16:00 +0000

Oversized white margins waste screen space on phones and e-readers, and they make printed pages look shrunken. PDF Arranger crops pages two ways: automatically, by removing the white borders around the content, and manually, by setting the margins yourself. This guide covers both, plus the related Hide margins option and when to use each.

A note on scope: cropping in PDF Arranger trims page edges. It is not a tool for removing an element from the middle of a page or editing page content — if content sits inside the area you keep, it stays.

Before you start

Step by step: crop white borders automatically

Open the PDF and select the pages you want to crop. Select all pages for a uniform result, or just the pages with excess margins.
Apply Crop white borders to the selection. PDF Arranger detects the content area of each page and trims the surrounding blank margin.
Inspect the result page by page. Pages with faint content near an edge — a light page number, for example — may be trimmed closer than you expect.
Export once the pages look right.

Manual cropping

When automatic detection does not match what you want, crop manually instead: select the pages, open the cropping controls, and drag the crop marks (or set the margins) so the kept area frames exactly the content you care about. Manual cropping is the better choice for mixed documents — for example keeping a wide margin on title pages while trimming body pages tightly — and for giving every page the same crop box even when their content differs.

Hide margins is not the same as cropping

Hide margins hides the margin areas of the selected pages rather than cutting the pages down the way a crop does. It is a lighter touch: useful when you mainly want margins out of the way for reading or printing, while a real crop is the option that actually trims the page to the content area. If you are preparing a file to share, test the exported result in another viewer to confirm it presents the way you intended.

Tips

Bookmarks and links can be lost after using Hide margins, so if the document’s outline matters, check it in the exported file.
Crop a copy first on important documents. Because the original file is untouched until you export, you can always redo the crop with looser margins.
Uniform page sizes after cropping also help if you plan to resize or print the document afterwards.

A worked example

Consider a scanned book chapter where every page carries a wide white border from the scanner bed. Select all pages and apply Crop white borders: the text block now fills the page, and the chapter becomes far more readable on a phone or e-reader. Contrast that with a certificate that has a decorative border you want to keep: automatic cropping might trim into the design, so you would crop that page manually with conservative margins instead — or not crop it at all. The lesson is that “crop everything the same way” is rarely right for mixed documents; batch the automatic crop for uniform pages, and handle special pages individually afterwards.

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How to Rotate PDF Pages

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:12:00 +0000

Scanned pages that come out sideways or upside down are one of the most common PDF annoyances. PDF Arranger rotates pages in 90-degree steps, and because you can see every page as a thumbnail, you can fix exactly the pages that are wrong — one page, a chapter, or every odd page in a scan — and leave the rest alone.

Rotation here is a page-level fix: it turns the whole page, including everything on it. It does not straighten slightly skewed scans by a few degrees; heavily tilted scans are better re-scanned or deskewed with a scanning tool first.

Before you start

Step by step: rotate pages

Open the PDF and scroll to the page that is facing the wrong way.
Select the page. For a single fix, one click is enough. For a batch fix, extend the selection first (see the selection tools below).
Apply a 90-degree rotation in the direction needed, using the rotate actions for the selected pages. Apply it again if the page needs 180 or 270 degrees in total.
Repeat the selection and rotation for any other wrongly oriented pages, choosing the direction per group — landscape pages in a portrait document may need the opposite turn.
Export the document. The new PDF keeps the corrected orientation permanently, in any viewer.

Selecting pages for batch rotation

PDF Arranger’s page selection tools are what make batch rotation quick. Beyond clicking and shift-selecting a continuous run, you can select all odd pages, all even pages, pages from the same file, pages of the same format (size), a page range, or invert the current selection. A typical use: a book scanned two sides at a time where every even page is upside down — select all even pages, rotate twice, done.

Tips

Check a rotated page at full zoom before exporting; text that reads correctly as a thumbnail occasionally turns out to belong to a deliberately landscape table or chart.
Rotation is lossless for the page content — you are changing orientation, not re-encoding the page.
If only some pages of a scan are rotated, the problem is usually the scanner’s auto-rotate setting; fixing it there prevents the issue next time.

A worked example

A common case: a 40-page scan where the even pages are all upside down because the scanner’s feeder flipped every second sheet. Rotating forty pages one by one would take ages, but the pattern does the work for you. Select all even pages with the selection tools, apply a 90-degree rotation twice (180 degrees in total), and every flipped page comes right in a single operation. Then export and spot-check three or four pages, including the first and last even pages, at reading size. If a document instead has one sideways table in the middle, the same workflow shrinks to selecting that single page and rotating it once.

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How to Reorder PDF Pages

Admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:08:00 +0000

Pages end up in the wrong order more often than people expect: a scanner feeds sheets backwards, a chapter gets inserted in the middle, or two documents are merged in the wrong sequence. PDF Arranger fixes all of these visually — you drag page thumbnails into place and export, with no need to rebuild the document.

This guide covers the four reordering tools you will actually use: drag and drop, moving pages between two open PDF Arranger windows, reversing the page order in one action, and swapping odd and even pages, the classic fix for double-sided scans.

Before you start

Step by step: drag pages into order

Open the PDF and, if needed, zoom out so you can see many thumbnails at once.
Select the page or pages to move. Click one page, or select several pages that belong together.
Drag the selection to its new position in the thumbnail grid and drop it. The remaining pages shift to make room.
Alternatively, cut and paste. Copy the selected pages, click where they should go, and paste them there — useful for precise placement in a long document.
Export the rearranged document as a new PDF once the order looks right.

Moving pages between two windows

You can run two PDF Arranger windows side by side and move or copy pages between them. Open the source document in one window and the destination in the other, then copy pages from the first and paste them into the second. This is the cleanest way to build a new document out of pages taken from several existing ones.

Reverse order and swap odd/even pages

Two built-in actions handle scanner mishaps. Reverse order flips the selected pages (or the whole document) back to front — exactly what you need when a stack was scanned from the last page to the first. Swap odd/even pages, strengthened in version 1.14.0, exchanges each odd page with the following even page, which repairs documents whose front and back sides were interleaved in the wrong sequence after duplex scanning.

Tips

Use Undo if a drag lands in the wrong place; it is faster than dragging the pages back by hand.
For long documents, reorder in small verified chunks rather than one giant drag, and export a test file before closing the original arrangement.

Which method for which mess?

It helps to match the tool to the problem. A few pages in the wrong place call for a simple drag. A whole document scanned back to front calls for Reverse order — one action instead of sixty drags. A duplex scan whose sheets came out front-back-front-back in the wrong pairing calls for Swap odd/even pages. And a document assembled from several sources calls for the two-window workflow, where each source stays open and untouched while you copy the pages you need into the destination. Choosing the right method is the difference between a two-minute fix and an afternoon of dragging thumbnails, so look at the pattern of the disorder before you start moving pages.

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