How does one edit a pdf?

[RecoveringYuppy]

I agree it's an open published standard*. I think they may even be working toward submitting it to ISO for public contributions to the standard. But I think it's still proprietary. They own the patents? You still have to agree to their terms of use? But I think they may have made their SDK free a while back.

ETA: After a bit of surfing I think the correct phrase above should be "open published format". Their legal page makes it sound like they are still controlling PDF for their own interests but doesn't use the word "proprietary".

 

[Soapy Sam]

Print it out.
Edit with tippex and a pencil.
Scan it and send as a JPG.

So I'm cheap. Sue me.

 

[bruto]

Print it out.
Edit with tippex and a pencil.
Scan it and send as a JPG.

So I'm cheap. Sue me.

With some scanners you could do that and rescan it as a PDF, too. My cheap Canon scanner will create PDF's directly.

 

[Powa]

The distiller changes everything into an image and embeds the image. This works good for images, but can make text look kind of bad, especially at high resolutions.

Huh? You're definitely doing something wrong if the Distiller changes everything into an image. Distiller embeds fonts and leaves text editable. You can then edit the text with Acrobat Professional, for example.

Plus, with the distiller there really isn't any way of changing the text short of creating a different pdf.

If the pdf was distilled with embeded fonts you can edit the text.

 

[MortFurd]

Huh? You're definitely doing something wrong if the Distiller changes everything into an image. Distiller embeds fonts and leaves text editable. You can then edit the text with Acrobat Professional, for example.


If the pdf was distilled with embeded fonts you can edit the text.

How well that works depends on how the fonts were embedded.

You have the option to embed the complete font, or just the parts your document uses. I had to change a couple of words in a PDF that used the "just the needed parts of the font" option, and while I could change the text, some of the letters wouldn't show on screen or on the printout - they weren't in the original document, and so weren't in the PDF. Since it was a bizarro font, it wasn't on my computer, either.

Long and short of it:
PDF is great at its intended job. It is a document format that retains its appearance no matter the output media.

As an editable file format, it sucks. It wasn't designed for that, and so doesn't do it well.

 

[Soapy Sam]

With some scanners you could do that and rescan it as a PDF, too. My cheap Canon scanner will create PDF's directly.

Yes, but you are violating my intellectual property rights. Send my royalties at once!

(Mine's an Epson. Must check.)

 

[Earthborn]

Here is another way. Upload the PDF, convert to DOC, have it sent to your email adress. May take a while, though. And whether it works obviously depends on whether the PDF actually contains text.