In my line of work, I have to do some mild editing of HTML documents before exporting them as PDFs. Part of this involves spacing out the document so a section or table isn’t cut n half and spread across two pages.
Is there a way to edit these from the PDF itself, in a visual format?
PDFFILL PDF Editor is inexpensive and works very well. Lots of power, just a little slow on really large PDF files. I prefer some implementations and tools in this program over Adobe Acrobat. I use Acrobat at work and PDFILL at home. I end up wishing I could combine some of the features from each.
I’m going to give this one bump. I’m looking for similar software. I tried PDF FILL, but it only allows you to fill out PDFs that have form fields. Some PDFs are forms, but don’t actually have the fields defined. Anyone have anything else?
You can cut the screen as a picture image (print screen button) and paste it into a picture editor (I’d recommend Irfanview, free & very good). Then you could do your editing that way.
I’ve also found that for many documents, a .png or .jpg image will be smaller than a matching PDF file. If that matters to you.
The best PDF resources can be found at PlanetPDF and PDFZone. I haven’t checked to see what is there, but if there is such a tool as you want, it will likely be on one of those two sites.
There is FoxitPDFEditor, but I have no idea if it will do what you want. I know FoxitPDFReader has a nasty tendency to move stuff off to the side and put black bars through what you’re trying to read.
Here’s a link to the Foxit PDF editor: Free Online PDF Editor | Edit PDF Files Effortlessly with Foxit
It offers an evaluation download. The price starts at $99.
This is slightly off topic, and I do apologize, but I wanted to warn you about editing PDFs in general. I use Acrobat 5 and 8, so I can’t speak to how well any free editors work. However, I can tell you that in Acrobat, editing the text of a PDF is dicey at best. Assuming the free PDF editors work like Acrobat, you’ll find that you can only edit text on one line, and if you try to move a block of text, you will have a problem. You may also find that in a block of text, you can move the whole block except for one word. Also, if you don’t have the same font installed on your computer as is used in the PDF, you’re completely out of luck and it will not edit the text at all.
Wherever possible, always edit the source document. Acrobat is not a word processor, and any attempts to make it behave as one will end in tears. The only thing it does relatively well is changing maybe a word or two, and the colors of the font.
On Mac OS X, you can do whatever you want in any app, and then Save To PDF from the print dialog.
It sounds like what you really need is a better html->pdf converter, that does things like not break tables.
Are you wedded to html? Have you considered using LaTeX or LyX for the original source? It might take some time to convert, but once you did it once, later exports would be easy, and would actually look good.
I think OpenOffice will take in HTML files, and I know it will export as PDF.