So I’ve not had much experience with PDF files, except for reading them. But I am searching for the simplest way to edit such documents. So far I’ve tried the following:
I used an online service that converts my PDF documents to Word, but it always seems to screw up the formatting (IOW, the Word document ends up not looking like the original PDF).
I’ve tried ‘Select All’ in the PDF doc, then copy/paste into the body of a Word doc, but it ends up looking really weird.
If I buy Adobe software, will that allow me to modify a PDF that someone sends me?
Are there any other options out there that I don’t know about?
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Adobe will gladly sell you software that will allow you to easily edit any PDF file. The question is whether it’s worth it to you. How often do you need to edit PDF files? If it’s quite often then just buy the capability from Adobe. I had it at a company I used to work at and it came in handy when I needed it once in a while… but it was free to me. I’ve tried online PDF editors but they never worked that well for me. YMMV.
The PDF should have text elements and not only images, although with pages with pure images one can add a text box over the text you want to edit, another limitation is that it looks at lines of text as separate elements but all can be selected, moved around, or erased to then add a text box that you can change. After the changes one can save the whole thing as a PDF again or other formats if one wants to.
One limitation to know: Inkscape can only edit a single page.
For multiple pages one can look at a free tool like Masterpdf on linux, be sure to download a version 4.x of MasterPDF because after 5 and over in Linux the free tool will add a watermark on all pages saved, like it does in all versions in Windows.
One can also get around the limits by looking at the many free simple editors that just add a page or extract a page from a PDF document, edit the single extracted page in Inkscape and then later add the corrected page to the larger document.
Inkscape is also available in Windows and can be made to work in some Macs.
What kind of editing are you trying to do? But, yes, Acrobat Pro works great. As for free tools, you have Libreoffice, PDFtk, Inkscape, PDFedit, etc.
To create a nice-looking PDF document like an article or book, honestly, I’d just use LaTeX or ConTeXt which are designed for high-quality typesetting.
Thanks, Dopers. I’ll try some of the free links that have been offered up & if they don’t work right, I think I’ll have to buy Adobe Pro. The weird thing is, I went to their website & it looks like you can only ‘subscribe’ to the software for $14.99/month. Does not appear to have any option to just buy it.
What version of Word do you have? Word can open a PDF file and convert it automatically. I have had very good success with this for straightforward business documents but not so much if you have complex layouts like a magazine or newspaper.
I have version 16.16.10 (2016?). I am only trying to convert straightforward business documents, but I don’t see this as an option. Can you let me know what version you are working with? Maybe I need to upgrade. Might be cheaper than buying the Adobe software…
It does not have the page limitation of Inkscape but the issue of fonts and the elements separated by lines is there. Of course one can easily remove the text lines and add text fields.
In Word, select Open and then Browse. The file dialogue box should give you options for which types of file to look for. The default is Word Documents but you can change that to PDF Documents. (In Windows anyway, that’s all I have access to right now)
I use Foxit as a PDF reader. They have another product PhantomPDF that supposedly allows you edit PDFs. They claim “Get Everything in Acrobat at a Fraction of the Price”. There is a free trial. I have never used PhantomPDF however so I can’t say how well it works.
You mean I don’t have to use Acrobat DC? I hate it with the passion of a thousand suns.
I subscribe to the insanely expensive Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Whatever. It’s over $600/year, but I do graphic design work as a freelancer, and I need Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign and the Bridge. It’s deductible and I more than recoup the cost anyway. BUT I HATE ACROBAT DC.
I’ve used it with good results. Some of the files I needed to use it for were absolute bitches, with tons of too-tight fields and stuff like that. You know how some people will use low dashes in blank “fill here” spaces in .docs, so when you write there everything gets out of whack? Several of the files were like that, including one form I had to fill weekly, and I was able to fix them easily.
Be grateful we’ve progressed beyond Acrobat Distiller.
I actually prefer using Illustrator to edit PDFs. DC crams extra tool bars onto old operating systems, and at least with Illustrator I don’t have to navigate through chunks of text blocks.
Generally, business documents are put into pdf format so that the recipient can’t edit them – a minimal protection against fraud and falsified documents. If you have a legitimate reason to be editing these documents, the originator should be willing to send them to you in a Word or similar format.
This. Came here to mention that Illustrator is my go-to for editing PDFs even though I also have Acrobat Pro. The Preview app on a Mac is a good choice for the things that it does, but that feature set is pretty limited.
I have never found any software that converts a non-trivial PDF to anything else without massive glitches and formatting problems, and if anyone ever does, I’d sure like to know about it. It’s almost like outputting any document to PDF is one-way.
I have Acrobat Pro but I rarely use it for editing so I’m not closely familiar with its capabilities, but I think editing PDFs is intrinsically limited compared to doing it properly on the original source material. I’ve used it for things like splitting up a big PDF or eliminating some pages from it and the like. Remember also that what you can do with any PDF can be limited by protections imposed by the author.