I am going to be getting some papers I have written and formatted scanned.
I will be getting them in PDF format, altho I could get them in OCR (But I would lose the formatting which is a big part of it)
Anyhow… These documents are OLD, and I may have to add to or modify them.
Without buying the Big Kahuna Acrobat 5, are there any other alternatives? I’m looking for simplicity, so I’m not interested in re-scanning and reformatting everything, and THEN re-converting to PDF. No way.
Phil
AFAIK, you cannot modify PDF documents. Not even when you have Acrobat.
I think some scanners can scan into Word format, and OmniPage can do the same thing IIRC.
You CAN modify PDF files that were printed to PDF. (At least with Acrobat 5 I can.)
BUT…these sound as if they were scanned. That is a little bit of a different story, especially maintaining formating. OmniPage 11 is the best bet here, but, while superb at OCR, you will need to make some corrections by hand in an editor (like Word).
::buzz:: Wrong! You can modify PDFs if you have the full version of Acrobat, using the text tool. I’ve done it many times. The only possible hitch would be if the original PDF had a security password to prevent modification.
I don’t know if you can modify PDFs in the free downloadable version of Acrobat, as I only work with the full version. It comes with Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and just about everything else Adobe makes.
The question is not clear at all. If the PDF pages just contain a scan of the original sheet then you just have a graphic enbedded in a PDF document which is not very useful. If the original page was created in PDF then you should be able to edit the text using Acrobat. Acrobat Reader only lets you read.
Quite true, sailor. That slipped my mind. Anything scanned graphically cannot be edited, unless you want to use Illustrator or CorelDRAW and make a fool of yourself.
If it was scanned using OCR recognition, you might have more luck. It’s been years since I’ve scanned text into OCR software, and I only edited the text in Word, not Acrobat, so I can’t contribute more to this thread unless we get more details.
BTW I scanned a buttload of text using OCR software, after everyone had left, then edited the wonky bits in Word (this was about five years ago). The rest of my team were re-typing everything. SUCKERS! 
If you want to edit them, you have to go with OCR. This means trashing the formatting, though not necessarily included images (a lot of OCR software has a “text AND graphics” choice)
IIRC, you can edit PDF files (only the full Writer program will do this) ONE LINE AT A TIME. Which means you can’t move chucnks of text around, and there is no “word wrap” which will move text after your edit point up or down to subsequent lines based on what you delete or insert.