I’ve got to make some changes to the hotel menu. Boss emails me an digital copy of our current menu in pdf format. But, the hotel doesn’t have an Adobe license that allows me to edit pdf files. The online tools I’ve found so far seem to allow me to insert text where I want it, but the current menu’s text is still there, underlying whatever I add. My take is that the editor doesn’t “see” the text already there AS text. Just a background image that happens to be a pattern that humans see as Latin lettering.
Word is causing problems because the spacing and alignment is completely borked when I open the pdf file as a Word document. I don’t see any way I could edit that and expect everything to be aligned properly when it is converted back to pdf.
Any advice? Need answer fast! Thanks in advance, Dopers!
Sorry guys. Using Office 2016 and Adobe Reader X. Also can’t download and install things, though internet access filters seem pretty liberal, so I should be able to access anything online that’s not overtly sketchy.
If you search for “free pdf editor”, lots of links come up, all with varying definitions of “free”. Some will let you edit a limited number of files as a test, which might work for you in this case. However, I am assuming that most will put an unwanted watermark on the page.
No useful answer (assuming Photoshop or Gimp isn’t an option! :smack: ) but I’m reminded of the wag who claims that PDF is an acronym for Pnon-portable Document Format. The ‘P’, like the ‘p’ in pneumonia, is silent.
Yuk. I’ll press for another format or source document when boss is back. I know the changes I want to make, just wrestling with the tools now. Thanks, Dopers!
You can use Acrobat Pro to do all kinds of editing, but it’s really best limited to things like changing prices and fixing typoes. PDF is meant to be an end-stage document exchange format, not a live format like .doc or whatever.
(You can do even more sophisticated editing in Adobe Illustrator, but that’s so far beyond “my boss gimme some files” I won’t even go there. )
Depending on the complexity of the document, a PDF to Word converter may do the trick. It allows you to import the content into word to edit it. There are some free ones and some web-based ones, however, their abilities are limited.
This is probably the simplest option, if you don’t have PDF editing software:
Open in Word. Save as a Word file. Change the formatting and layout to look the way you want (this could potentially be time-consuming). Save the edited file for future reference.
Now, save as PDF. It should come out looking just like the Word doc. Which may be slightly different from the starting document, depending on how much time you put into formatting it…
That’s the normal PDF creation cycle. You create a doc in whatever software or combination of software makes it the way you want… and then AS A FINAL STEP save it to PDF to make it smaller, more compact, more platform- and printer-independent, and pretty much idiot-proof. For changes, go back to your creation/editing/assembly tool and make them there, then save/export a new PDF.
Think of PDF as a print master or archive file, not a document.
Just chiming in to agree with the posters who said the same as this. Do the document in Word and convert it to a PDF at the end. You might be able to OCR the document to get it into Word?
If you haven’t got an export to PDF you might be able to install a free PDF printer. A little app that appears to be a printer to your system but creates PDF documents when printed to. Some programs like Sage Accounting come with them. Or CutePDF and the like.
my sister would do what drcube suggests … and that probably is the best diplomatic approach. i, on other hand, would request:
original *.doc file
original fonts
supporting software (office)
… and would then create *.pdf file for him to approve. there are other viable work-arounds … but those still necessitate the original fonts.
as you found out … many pdf-tools may not edit what you have in mind. inside the code are two or more “levels”. there may also be security stamp imposed on the document … which further negates revision.
and, definitely, avoid using software which does not retain the coherency of the origin. that means no scanning or ocr or photoshop … nada!
No watermark and it allows you to “white out” that existing text.
The problem with that, in your case, though is that it requires a solid background (any image background would then be blotted out wherever you made changes) and it would require a lot of fine tuning to get the new text to look professional (but that is a problem for almost all of those non-Adobe programs).
They might have a page limit, but I don’t recall (if they do, I haven’t hit it yet).
If it is only text, you can “save as text”, then open the text file in word (or your text editor), reformat and edit. Then export as a PDF. But you’ll lose any graphics in the PDF doc.
I’ve used the program “LayOut” (that comes with SketchUP). Copy the PDF into Layout, size appropriately and then white-out the areas you want to change with boxes, then write over them. It might take some time to find the matching font, but once you do, it works quite well. I did this just the other day and my edited version was indistinguishable form the original. You might have to get creative in cutting and pasting if you need more room for some text than is available, but it’s doable.
You can probably do that in GIMP, too, but I’ve found GIMP to be very unstable and a memory hog. Very difficult to work with.
I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet, but you can often do minor changes using a simple text editor. For example, you can open the PDF with Notepad and change things like prices, numbers, and individual words without significantly affecting the overall appearance. I do this all the time. You can search the text for the alphanumeric values you need to change.
But you run into problems when you have to add a line or change spacing significantly.
What the OP needs is the original layout file for the “hotel menu,” so that he can edit it as needed whenever needed… and then print-to or export to a fresh PDF each time. All of the above workarounds are great for a one-time or emergency change (I’ve used most of them). But “hack editing” a formatted document will be too tedious and prone to munging up the layout, content etc. if repeated.
Edit in Word or whatever. Print to PDF again. /nufsed
