Moving PDFs to a PC From an iPad

Q. I’d like to move all the PDFs on my iPad over to my Windows computer. How would I do that?

A. Most popular PDF apps for iOS, including Adobe Acrobat Reader DC and Apple’s iBooks software, have at least one or two options for sharing the files. Two common methods for sharing are emailing the documents, or saving them to an online cloud storage site that you can get to from your computer. (If the files have copy-protection built in, you will probably need the password to open them at some point.)

When you have a file open in the Adobe Acrobat Reader app, tap the screen to summon the toolbar and then tap the Share icon in the lower-right corner of the screen. A menu appears with various destinations, including Adobe’s subscription-based Document Cloud or the Share File command, which lets you send the file by iMessage or Mail. You can also choose to save the file to an app like Evernote or Microsoft OneNote, or to one of the various cloud storage services like Dropbox that sync with a PC.

The Share menu in Apple’s iBooks app gives you a command to email an open PDF, but if you sync the iPad with iTunes on your Windows computer, you can adjust your iTunes sync settings to copy all the PDFs in your iBooks library over to the PC at once; the documents should be in the Books folder in the iTunes Media folder in the computer’s Music library. If you use Apple’s iCloud service, you can also find instructions on the company’s site for using iCloud Drive to sync and share PDFs among devices and computers.