I generally tell people that PDF's are meant to not be edited and that is the other main reason they're used all over the web. The first of course being that they're platform independent. If PDF's were as easy to edit as opening a Word document there would be way fewer people using them.
What drives me the most crazy is when somebody asks how to edit the PDF and I look at the document and it's obviously internal. I say, well, so and so created this so get the original. The most ridiculous is when it's an internally created original document which is then printed, then scanned, then they want to edit the PDF. Come on, work with me here ;-) Curtis McKay Network Administrator Belleville Township High School District 201 cmc...@bths201.org -----Original Message----- From: tech-geeks-boun...@tech-geeks.org [mailto:tech-geeks-boun...@tech-geeks.org] On Behalf Of JimHays Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 7:42 AM To: Tech-Geeks Mailing List Subject: Re: [tech-geeks] edit pdf's People don't seem to understand exactly what a PDF is. It all depends on how the PDF was created. If the PDF was created with Acrobat, you stand a much better chance of editing the file. If the file was created by scanning a paper document on a copier, that is a different story. Of course, it is a PDF, but it is a PDF that consists of a large IMAGE. The PDF code just "wraps up the image" so that a standard PDF reader can display it. There is no text to edit only an image. As someone has mentioned here, you could use a good OCR package to convert the image into text but this is not really a PDF editor. You could convert the image to text with the OCR package if it were a JPG, GIF, PNG or other image formated file. As Tom states, you could open the PDF file with GIMP and then use layers to overlay small parts of the document with new text. This wold require matching fonts and font sizes and would rely heavily on trial and error. It can be done and the result can be saved as a PDF. Of course the best way to edit a PDF is to have access to the original document from which the PDF was created and edit that document - probably a Word document - saving the edited document as a PDF. I often get asked how to edit a PDF document that was scanned from the copier. My answer is this. "If I could edit a PDF file that was created with a document, I would not be working here. I would be a wealthy man and would not need to work." Jared Lynn wrote: > On a similar topic, what would you use to edit the text that you have > scanned in? > Jared Lynn > PORTA CUSD #202 Technology Coordinator > E-mail: jl...@porta202.org <mailto:jl...@porta202.org> > Phone: 217-501-4920 > > > On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Steele, Thomas C > <tste...@manteno5.org <mailto:tste...@manteno5.org>> wrote: > > ...and for those more complex documents, Photoshop (and I think > GIMP) can render PDF files as a graphic. You would not be able to > edit type (you could replace it with a new text box) but you can > use the selection tools to move things around or add elements. > > > > -TS > > > > Thomas C. Steele > Technology Director > Manteno CUSD #5 > > > | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org | | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org |
