BETTER NOVELS, MUSIC, BETTER INFORMATION, News, Events,Entertainment, Lifestyle,Fashion,Beauty, Inspiration and yes... Gossip!*Wink*salutation to the world stars!
PDFs can be a serious pain to edit if you don't have the right tools. Here's what you need.
If you've ever tried to edit a Portable Document File, or PDF,
you've almost certainly discovered that it's a lot more trouble than
editing a Microsoft Office
document. That's because the PDF format was never designed to be edited
at all. When Adobe introduced the PDF spec back in 1992, the whole idea
was that you could work with PDF documents on screen the same way you
worked with documents on paper. A PDF was supposed to be a virtual
printout, the on-screen equivalent of hard copy. Like any printed hard
copy, it wasn't intended to be changed.
It didn't take long before users wanted to correct typos, replace old
product logos with new ones, and even change fonts and layouts in their
PDFs. Thus, productivity software
makers started providing PDF editing tools. That said, you still can't
edit a PDF with the same ease and flexibility as say, a Word document,
and you probably never will. But don't worry: You can edit PDFs, and
we'll tell you how. First, however, we'll explain the challenges you're
up against.
Why Are PDF Files So Hard to Edit?
The PDF format was devised before
everyone started using web browsers and is based on the printed page.
That means you can't add a few lines of text in the middle of page one,
for example, and make the remaining text on the page flow smoothly into
page two, as you can in a word processor. Instead, you need to resize
the fonts on page one or change the size of the box that contains the
text. If you want to add more text that will fit on the page, we offer
some tips in a later section, but don't expect perfect results.
While many apps call themselves PDF editors, they
can't actually edit the text and graphics in a PDF file. They only let
you add comments to the PDF file—either boxed Post-It-style notes or
lines and text boxes that appear on a layer above the PDF's actual
contents. When you add a comment to a PDF, it's akin to putting the PDF
file under a pane of glass and writing comments on the glass. You can't
make any permanent changes to the text, such as removing sensitive data,
and anyone using a free PDF viewer like Adobe Acrobat Reader or the
Preview on mavOS can change or remove the comments you make. With that
in mind, we detail a roundabout way to bake comments permanently into a
PDF file at the end of this article.
A true PDF editor lets you change, move, delete, and add actual
content to the PDF, in a way that won't let anyone change your edits
unless they also use a true PDF editor. You can use a high-priced one
like Adobe Acrobat DC,
with unique features for matching fonts on scanned images, but, for
many purposes, you can get equally good results from less expensive
editors such as PDF-Xchange Editor (Windows) or PDFelement 6 (macOS or
Windows). The basic techniques are the same in all PDF editors, despite
the interface differences.
Editing a PDF File
Adobe Acrobat DC, the ultimate PDF editor, offers a spacious
interface with fine-tuned controls for editing text and images. With
your PDF open in Acrobat's window, choose Edit PDF from the Tools menu.
Blue boxes then appear around each PDF element—text or graphics. To
correct an error in the text, simply click in the text box and start
typing. Below is an example of using Acrobat DC to change the text in a
header.
The Format sidebar gives you
precise control over all formatting, including letter-spacing. You can
use the Horizontal Scaling field to stretch or compress text to fit. You
can also resize the box if needed. When you select an image box, you
can crop, resize, or replace the image, or edit it in a separate
image-editing app.
Cheaper PDF Editing
The same basic principles apply in more budget-friendly apps such as
PDF-XChange Editor. With the PDF open in the app, click Edit in the Home
toolbar, then select the kind of content you want to edit—either all
the content on the page, or text, images, or shapes. Below is an example
of what it looks like to replace or modify images in a PDF using
PDF-XChange Editor.
Notice that there's a default option that lets you edit text elements
as blocks. (If you turn this off, the app will only let you modify
blocks of a few words, and you may end up with awkward-looking spacing
between words.)
Simply click on the text and make your changes. From the gear icon at
the bottom left, you can select Properties Pane to get a menu with
options for fonts and paragraph alignment, but you won't find the
fine-tuning controls that Acrobat offers.
Formatting Your PDFs
No matter what PDF editor you use,
don't expect the same ease of use you get with a word processor. When
you edit a line in a justified (full-width) paragraph, the text is
likely to lurch to the left, leaving a blank space between the end of
the line and the right margin. You can fix this by right-clicking on the
line, choosing Paragraph from the pop-up menu, and setting the alignment to Justify.
Insert a quotation mark can also cause formatting troubles. PDF
editors don't understand smart quotes (slanted typographic quotation
marks) the way word-processors do, so they insert straight,
typewriter-style quote marks instead. Instead, you need to copy and
paste a real quotation mark from elsewhere in the same PDF or another
source, such as the web or a Word document.
In PDF-Xchange Editor, as in any full-featured PDF editing app, you
can resize text boxes and make the text reflow to match the new size,
but remember that you can't make text reflow from one page to the next.
Images can be resized, replaced, or modified via the same right-click
menu.
Advanced PDF Editing Features
Adobe Acrobat DC offers the most advanced PDF editing on the planet.
Like all PDF editors, Acrobat works well with PDFs created by apps like
Word and Excel. Further, when you add or edit text to a PDF, PDF editors
can match the font of the surrounding text, since that font is
installed on your Windows system.
Acrobat, however, performs one amazing feat that no other app even
approaches. If you use Acrobat to edit an image scanned from an old book
or magazine that used a hot-metal font that hasn't existed for a
hundred years, Acrobat lets you edit the text in the scanned image using
that same ancient font. It does this trick by performing an optical
character recognition (OCR) process on the image and constructing a font
from the characters it finds. When you edit the text in the PDF,
Acrobat uses this newly constructed font to match the surrounding text.
In the image below, we're adding the "A" to the heading "A Tea Party."
Acrobat uses the same letter "A" that appears elsewhere in the header.
Edit PDFs for Free
We promised to tell you how to make some permanent changes in a PDF
using only freeware tools like Adobe Acrobat Reader or Preview on macOS.
On Windows, you need to install the BullZip PDF Printer Driver, which
is free for personal use; other freeware PDF printer drivers may or may
not work. (Microsoft's built-in Microsoft Print to PDF printer driver
isn't useful for this purpose, because it doesn't create a searchable
PDF, only an image.)
In Acrobat Reader, make your comments (such as lines, text boxes, and
highlights) on the PDF file, and then print the PDF to the BullZip PDF
Printer Driver. The resulting PDF will have searchable text, just like
the original, but the comments will be baked into the PDF, and not
easily removable.
On macOS, open the PDF in Preview and make all of your comments. From
the Print menu, click the PDF button, and then Save as Postscript to a
convenient location. Next, open that .PS file in Preview and export it
again to PDF format. The resulting PDF will be searchable, but the
comments will be baked in.
PDF Tips, Tricks, and Apps
Of course, there are many other utilities
for editing PDFs, and many other platforms on which you might want to
edit them, but those are beyond the scope of this article. In upcoming
stories, we'll look at additional topics, such as how to sign PDFs, how
to combine PDFs, and how to convert PDFs to Word (and vice versa). If
you're looking for other PDF tips or you'd like to tell us about your
favorite PDF trick or app, let us know in the comments below.
No comments:
Post a Comment