PDF is one of the most popular formats in use today. According to Statistics of Common Crawl Monthly Archives, PDF is the 2nd most famous file format on the web (after HTML)—more popular than JPEG, PNG, or GIF files.
And as every aspect of our life and work is being digitized, we need to share PDFs online more and more often. Here’s where the question arises: how to share a PDF on the web when it is often quite heavy and not tailored for online viewing?
Don’t fret! There are many convenient tools that are excellent for the job. Whether you just need to upload a PDF to share it with your colleagues or you want to make your PDF interactive and then share it as a link, you’ll find the tools that suit your exact purpose in our article. Let’s get started.
#1 Adobe Acrobat DC
Best for: Creating, editing, and sharing PDFs with your team
Adobe Acrobat DC is the first choice for many marketers, designers, and publishers. It's famous and widely used software for creating and working with PDFs. The software also allows you to share a PDF with your team by following these steps:
- Open a PDF in Acrobat DC and click the Share With Others icon in the top toolbar.
- Add the email address of each recipient.
- Add an optional deadline or reminder.
- Make sure Allow comments is selected.
- Click Send to share a link to the PDF online.
Thus, you can send an email with the link to multiple reviewers at the same time. They’ll all have access to annotate the same PDF document wherever they are, on any device.
#2 Google Drive
Best for: Storing and sharing PDFs for collaboration with your team
You can share the PDFs that you store in Google Drive with anyone you want. Don’t forget that if you have a work or school account, your organization may limit the way you can share files with other people. Here’s how you can share a PDF:
- In Google Drive, select your file and click Share.
- Enter the names or email addresses of the people you want to share the PDF with.
- Choose their permission level (edit, comment, or view) and click Send.
Plus, you can simply set a permission level for your PDF and then copy the link to it and send it to your colleagues or partners via email or messenger.
#3 Docdroid
Best for: Sharing PDFs with a simple browser preview
With such a simple document-sharing platform as DocDroid, you only need to upload a PDF you want to share, and the program will create a link that you can send to your friends and colleagues or use to embed your document into a website as iFrame. DocDroid also creates a convenient browser preview for your readers.
Your PDFs are secured with Docdroid as the documents you upload to the platform are not publicly listed. If you want to, you can set up password protection or make your document private at any time. Plus, all documents are automatically deleted if they haven’t been viewed within 60 days.
#4 Smallpdf
Best for: Editing, annotating, and sharing PDFs
Smallpdf is another platform for uploading and sharing documents. It also lets you edit PDFs by adding text, shapes, images, and annotations. To share a PDF with Smallpdf you need to do the following:
- Select the file you want to share.
- Enter the recipient’s email address.
- Add a personalized message. Your recipient gets a download link or an email that includes a link to download your document with a personalized message from you.
- Share or generate a link to download and send it via WhatsApp, Viber, Gmail.
Smallpdf uses SSL encryption to protect your documents during all file transfers. They also remove the files from their system after 14 days, so make sure your recipients download your PDF before that happens.
#5 FlippingBook
Best for: Creating interactive PDFs with a page flip effect and sharing them in one click
FlippingBook is an online service for creating interactive online documents. It allows you to convert your PDFs into interactive HTML5 flipbooks with a realistic page flip effect that are very easy to share. FlippingBook offers many convenient ways to do that:
- Direct links. Simply copy the link to your online flipbook and send it via email or messenger to your client or colleague, and they will be able to open it right away on any device. No need for heavy attachments that take ages to download.
- Share on social media. Copy and post the link to your flipbook on social media, and it will automatically turn into a beautiful preview of your document that will catch your readers’ attention right away.
- Embed into your website. Just copy and paste the embed code of your flipbook and showcase it on your platform. It will fit seamlessly into any page of your website.
Bonus tip. FlippingBook helps you empower your PDF flipbooks to make them even more engaging for your readers: brand them with your logo and company colors and add interactive features such as videos, GIFs, pop-up images, and outbound links.
6 Reasons to Make a PDF Interactive
Create yours
#6 Marq
Best for: Creating PDFs from scratch and sharing them with a simple preview
A web graphic design app such as Marq can be your choice if you have design skills and want to create PDFs from scratch and then share them with a simple preview. Here’s how you can share a PDF via Marq:
- Publish your PDF on the web via Marq and get a direct link to it that you can send to anyone you need.
- Insert your published PDF into an email using a special embed code. In the email, the first page of the document will be shown. When people click on it, your document’s published URL will open in a new window.
- Embed your PDF into a website with the help of a simple embed code.
- Post to social media right from Marq in a fuss-free way.
#7 Publitas
Best for: Monetizing PDFs and sharing them online
If you're looking for a way to monetize your PDF catalogs and magazines and share them online with ease, then Publitas aims to serve. It's a digital publishing platform that converts PDFs into HTML5 publications (with or without page flip effect) and allows customers to read them for free or to buy them through an online checkout system.
Simply sign up for Publitas and drag & drop your PDF files into the app to get an online link. It's that easy. Plus, you can get an embed code to show your PDF on your website or create an email newsletter and add your link in the email.
#8 Flowpaper
Best for: Sharing PDFs via a simple PDF viewer
Flowpaper is one more tool that allows you to present a PDF on the web with the help of a simple PDF viewer. Plus, you can enhance your PDF with links, images, galleries, and videos.
This web PDF viewer offers you the opportunities to share a PDF as a link, post it as a link on social media, or embed it into a website via an embed code.
That’s it! That was our list of the most popular tools for sharing a PDF in various ways. We hope you’ll find the one that suits you best!
