Sometimes we just need a quick measurement on a PDF drawing file and PDF measuring tools provide the best way to do that. These tools simply measure the distance, area, parameter and so on in your PDF with AI.
There are plenty of great PDF measuring tools for Mac and Windows users if you know where to look. Here are the best 10 PDF measuring tools I found and I think they are the best. They are either offline or online, and even are free to use, they all provide reliable and easy-to-use measurement tools, also other useful features.
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is surely the most complete PDF tool out there right now. You can work on a PDF for all kinds of tasks you may want to. The tools include editing texts, images, links, pages, media, 3D object, attachment, bookmarks, annotations, fields, buttons, boxes, signatures, stamps, shapes as well as redacting, OCR, optimizing, sharing, reviewing and so on.
The app offers rich measuring tools and options to help users measure an object accurately and easily. Users can measure the distance between 2 points using the Distance tool, measure a set of distances between multiple points using Perimeter tool, and measure the area of a drawing using the Area tool. You can measure an object as you want, meaning you can snap the measurement to the end/endpoint/midpoint/intersection of a line. Measuring an object might look daunting, but Acrobat offers a lot of options to help you simplify the measurement, you can change scale ratio and precision, markup label, enable or disable Ortho, show or hide the rulers. You can even export the measurement markup to Excel file and save all the measurement info in CSV format.
Foxit PhantomPDF
Foxit offers a variety of customizable PDF tools that win when it comes to easiness, because it is laid out similarly to Microsoft Office tools. The problem: there is a bit of formatting loss, for the reason that it doesn’t have a library as huge as Acrobat to recognize and reflow the texts with same font or style, but it’s perfectly workable. I like seeing a tool that is not just copying Acrobat but cannot match at all, and for that reason I think some people will prefer the Foxit measuring tools.
The measuring tools are no difference from those in Acrobat, you can choose between Distance, Area and Perimeter, but they are in different look, you can set the parameters in the Comment Format tab. Foxit accommodates this measuring tool in the Comment ribbon, so users can work on the measurement markups as the way they work on a comment, those markups can be moved, resized, flipped, set with a status, replied, etc.
PDF Expert
Among the many PDF editor apps for Mac/iPhone/iPad, PDF Expert is always the top for its balance of simplicity, versatility, and price. The app offers a slate of editing, annotation, OCR and export tools in its Mac version, and since 2021, its iOS versions added a construction tool for iOS users to draw and measure an object in PDF.
Under the Measure tab, there are 4 tools: calibrate, distance, area, perimeter, which means you can measure the drawing the same ways as in Acrobat or Foxit, also you can calibrate a PDF to a known dimension. It is a pity that this measuring tool is only available in PDF Expert PRO for iOS, and it doesn’t have customizable options as many as others.
Preview
If you own a Mac you don’t need any app to measure distance in a PDF, you can just open the PDF in Preview and show Inspector tool. This tool will measure distance in points, inches or centimeters.
The results can be accurate, though you may need to select an object precisely and do the match to calculate the measurement. This is useful for measuring the distance of an object with regular shapes that composed of straight lines and points.
This feature doesn’t work for all of Mac users, because you ll have to do the calculations yourself. Still, it’s nice not to have to install anything, especially when you just need to measure the distance of a simple object.
Foxyutils
Your choice of online PDF editors will make a big difference in the quality of your output PDF files, but regarding measuring PDF online, it doesn’t, because most of the online choices offer the same measurement tools and options. Some online PDF measuring tools, such as Foxyutil, highlight it fast service.
Foxyutils is one of the web PDF tools used by a large of population today, handling more than 10+ PDF tasks. It might not be as competent as others on several features, but needless to say, Foxyutils’s got the majority of the market when it comes to measure PDF online. It can measure distance and area, also calibrate.
i2pdf
If you’re looking for online PDF measuring tool other than Foxyutils, i2pdf is a top contender. This tool also gets high marks for fast speed and good user experience on the website. It is easy and safe to use, because it will auto delete your file in 30minutes.
I2pdf can measure distance, perimeter, and area in different shapes (rectangle, round, polygon). And there are 20+ PDF tools available: edit, ocr, crop, split, extract, redact, deskew, etc.
Aspose
If both above listed web PDF measuring tools fail to trigger your interest, Aspose is worth a try. Though not as reputable as Foxyutils or i2pdf in pdf measureing, Aspose offers a lot of features for PDF work. It was launched and started to offer ad-free file format tools to view, edit, convert, compare, compress, annotate Word/Excel/PowerPoint/PDF/Outlook files and more.
If you are hoping measuring objects in a file that saved in formats like FBX, STL, OBJ, 3DS ZIP and so on, Aspose might be the best choice for you.
Other alternatives
If you are looking for accurate PDF measuring tools other than Adobe Acrobat and Foxit, there are some good options:
- PDFelement (best alternative to Adobe Acrobat, but less powerful and has format issues)
- SwifDoo PDF (simplest PDF editor with basic editing features, but has format issues)
- PDF Annotator (best PDF annotation tool for Windows, but cannot edit a PDF)
They offer less features and tools, but all are useful for measurement in a PDF file. You can check their features and tutorials on the web before downloading the free trial versions to your PC.
There are more third-party apps that will do the job of measuring the distance or area of an object for you. Adobe Acrobat is the best option that we’ve come across on macOS and Windows, which makes accurate and simple work of measuring parameter, area and distance. It’s going to take a while for online PDF measurement tools to be as powerful as offline ones, but if you want to try some free, they have already started appearing on the scene and we’ve picked for you.