Editing PDF Files: PDF files are so common that I'm surprised competent editors aren't available, except from Adobe at $450 or $179/year. I tried two or three editors

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

PDF files are so common that I'm surprised competent editors aren't available, except from Adobe at $450 or $179/year. I tried two or three editors - cheap, online, and free, and they're not worth the trouble.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Have you looked at Cute PDF?

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

jerryc41 wrote:

PDF files are so common that I'm surprised competent editors aren't available, except from Adobe at $450 or $179/year. I tried two or three editors - cheap, online, and free, and they're not worth the trouble.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

jerryc41 wrote:

PDF files are so common that I'm surprised competent editors aren't available, except from Adobe at $450 or $179/year. I tried two or three editors - cheap, online, and free, and they're not worth the trouble.

You can do anything to PDF's in Adobe Bridge!

Frank T Loc: New York, NY

You can download PDF Editor free from Google.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

speters wrote:

You can do anything to PDF's in Adobe Bridge!

I just tried this, and I can't figure out how you can edit PDFs in Bridge. When I try to open one, it switches to Adobe Reader. There is a Edit PDF drop-down menu under Tools, but it refers you to Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Hamltnblue Loc: Springfield PA

There are a few decent ones out there. Nuance Power PDF is the one I use.
Not a smoothe as Adobe with large files but a better interface IMO.
I use it with construction drawings up to a half gig in size.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

JohnSwanda wrote:

I just tried this, and I can't figure out how you can edit PDFs in Bridge. When I try to open one, it switches to Adobe Reader. There is a Edit PDF drop-down menu under Tools, but it refers you to Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Mmmh, I never had that happen!

cincykid

I've had good luck with pdfforge

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Thanks. I'll try your recommendations.

sb Loc: Florida's East Coast

PDF files were originally designed to be better legal documents mostly because they cannot easily be edited. It is a pain in the butt at times. It would be nice, though, to be easily able to "COPY" part of a PDF file as a WORD document, so that it could be adapted or inserted into another WORD doc.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

sb wrote:

PDF files were originally designed to be better legal documents mostly because they cannot easily be edited. It is a pain in the butt at times. It would be nice, though, to be easily able to "COPY" part of a PDF file as a WORD document, so that it could be adapted or inserted into another WORD doc.

One can copy from a PDF if protection is not set in the PDF by the PDF creator.

I just copied some text from a PDF and pasted it into a Word document.
HOWEVER, the copy command (highlight and CTL-C) will NOT copy any/all text formatting, only the text itself.
If you can highlight it, you can probably copy it.

Indi Loc: L. I., NY, Palm Beach Cty when it's cold.

You can also Save a word Document as a PDF.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

PDF has several modes. I suspect that the original mode was a word processing file saved in a format that made it difficult to change unless you had the same software as the recipient. Another mode is to just encode an image. If you save a document as an image, then save it as a PDF, the software will not be able to read the text. For that you will have to turn to OCR software. But of course, that will not give you the formatting of the document.

If you have a PDF that was generated from a text or word processing file, you can highlight text, copy, and paste into another document. If it was an image saved as a PDF, you can't do that (although you can save a segment of the file as an image).

Personally, when I have to edit a PDF, I load it into Photoshop. Photoshop can save the result as a PDF.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Indi wrote:

You can also Save a word Document as a PDF.

While true,
the question at hand is regarding editing an existing PDF, not creating a new PDF.