Modifying PDF

[Pippin]

Hi there,

I have a .pdf version of a book and for some reason, I can't change its content. Has anyone ever tried to fix (for their own and personal use) something in a pdf book? How did you do?

I'm talking about changing "+2" to "+3" for example, not replacing an entire paragraph with another.

[EldritchWeaver]

Some books have editing locked down. A trick I've found useful on occasion was to print the PDF using a PDF printer and do the stuff in the copy, but this kills bookmarks and other features.

[HouseRules]

The expensive (and DMCA legal) ways is to get a license to modify a locked down pdf.

[SirNibbles]

The software to edit PDFs is different from the software to read PDFs, and usually requires you to pay money.

[Eldariel]

Acrobat Pro allows modifying PDFs (unless they're specifically protected). The easiest way to get access to it is through employment/university, but you can of course buy it for yourself. It's fairly expensive though. Newer versions of Word can also open up .pdfs and save them usually but again, that wreaks havoc on the details. It's fully possible to redo all the bookmarks and such; the nuclear option is screenshotting every page, making a new .pdf, running OCR and remaking the bookmarks.

[StevenC21]

http://pdfedit.cz/en/index.html

If you use software, use free software.

[ericgrau]

I think PDF xchange viewer is free and does what you want for basic edits. I use it all the time. Rather than editing the text, you can type over it with a text box. Just find the matching font, type your text, move carefully into position and you're golden. A trick for quick accurate positioning is to include an existing letter of text and zoom way in. So in your example you would type "+3" not "3", zoom way in, and move the new "+" over the old "+" to make it line up.

You can right click on the text button to create a new text style. Clone an existing style and edit it. Change the settings how you like it. You'll notice font is not one of those settings, which is annoying. Instead while typing you can change the font, and then click the "set as default" button. That will make that the default font for your new text style, but not for other text styles. So every time you select it in the future you'll get the font you want, but when you select a different style you'll get a different font you want. You might need a menu option or hotkey to make the font menu show up, I forget. Google it if you get stuck. But once you make it visible at least it stays visible.