JoltVib

It may sound funny to say this, but PDF files — electronic copies of printed documents — are still around and are still very useful. Short for Portable Document Format, PDFs allow you to create a digital version of a paper document, letting you store and access them a lot easier than having to rifle through a filing cabinet.

While there are a variety of PDF apps available — Adobe Acrobat being the most well known — you actually don’t need to download one to create a PDF from an existing paper document with your iPhone or iPad. You can just use Apple’s Files or Notes.

It’s very quick to create a PDF using your Files app (thanks to two of our readers, chadsmo and Just_Some_Nobody). The process is similar on an iPad.

You can also start a new PDF from Notes.

From there, the process is the same as if you started from your Files app.

If you have existing documents that you want to save as PDFs — in your Files app, on Safari, in Photos, or in other apps — you can do that as well, using either Markup or Print, depending on what is available from the app you’re using.

Update, July 8th, 2024: Added instructions for using Files to create PDFs.

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