Editing PDF files

[Old Gringo]

Need a program to edit a received PDF file to be resent.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 21:48:43

 

[Box134]

Well, the only software I've seen which can "edit" PDFs is Adobe Acrobat.
Even so, PDFs aren't meant to be edited extensively. For example, with
Acrobat you can delete or insert small bits of text and it will re-flow it
for you. If you are thinking of extensive changes, you need the original
files. PDFs are meant to be the end-product for a document, not an editable
entity, AFAIK.

 

[John Corliss]

Well, the only software I've seen which can "edit" PDFs is Adobe Acrobat.
Even so, PDFs aren't meant to be edited extensively. For example, with
Acrobat you can delete or insert small bits of text and it will re-flow it
for you. If you are thinking of extensive changes, you need the original
files. PDFs are meant to be the end-product for a document, not an editable
entity, AFAIK.

That's right. And some .pdf authors place restrictions on their works so
that you can't, for instance, even copy text and-or images.

The question of "is there a freeware that allows me to edit an existing
..pdf file" has been asked ad nauseum in this group, and the answer is
pretty much always the same:

"no."

I've looked and looked, and the only thing I've been able to find that
retains double hard returns (unlike Acrobat Readers text select, copy
and paste [when allowed that is]) is PDFTOHTML, a command line
Sourceforge program:

Home page: http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/
Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/

Once the HTML version has been created, it can be opened in a browser
and saved as a text document. Then the text document can be editied,
converted and saved in your favorite word processor.

So far, this is the best I can come up with.

 

[Old Gringo]

Well, the only software I've seen which can "edit" PDFs is Adobe Acrobat.
Even so, PDFs aren't meant to be edited extensively. For example, with
Acrobat you can delete or insert small bits of text and it will re-flow it
for you. If you are thinking of extensive changes, you need the original
files. PDFs are meant to be the end-product for a document, not an editable
entity, AFAIK.

Thanks for the info. I have found out quite a bit about PDF files in
the past few hours. Thanks again.

 

[PDFrank]

Well, the only software I've seen which can "edit" PDFs is Adobe Acrobat.

You should look around. Acrobat is only a so-so editor. At one time
there were no other choices. Now there are PDF editors that are more
powerful than Acrobat.

Even so, PDFs aren't meant to be edited extensively. For example, with
Acrobat you can delete or insert small bits of text and it will re-flow it
for you. If you are thinking of extensive changes, you need the original
files. PDFs are meant to be the end-product for a document, not an editable
entity, AFAIK.

PDFs can reflow just like a Word or WordPerfect file. The editing
program has to be written to permit that level of editing. Acrobat, by
contrast, is designed to perpetuate the Adobe propaganda -- that PDF is
"electronic paper." I think they're afraid that if it isn't made
difficult to edit a PDF, the intrinsic value of the PDF format will be
regraded.

But since this is a freeware group, I have successfully performed MINOR
text editing of PDFs with the free program PDFTK. You can uncompress
the text streams and edit the text in Notepad. Then repair the XREF
table with PDFTK, and recompress the streams.