Posted by Editing a .pdf can be tricky. Though it’s a great way to quickly compile and publish information, it isn’t a file foPDFrmat you can edit out of the box. Unlike a Microsoft Office document, a .pdf in’t designed for editing, which is why you need the right tools to tweak the content.
A quick search on the internet will show you many editing options for .pdf documents. Some are quite expensive, but the cheap or free editors only offer basic features and don’t convert files accurately. Many can’t edit the text or graphics in a .pdf, but they allow you to add comments using sticky note-style notes or text boxes and lines above the contents of the file.
Some editors work in your browser, but they don’t have as many features as their desktop counterparts. Plus, they expose your files to the internet, which may be a concern, especially if they contain confidential or sensitive content. You can use a VPN to encrypt your connection for extra security, though.
A good .pdf editor will allow you to move, change, delete and add content to the document. It’ll also keep your edits intact so that no one else can change them unless they have an equally good tool. Checkout the best tools at ce site.
The basic techniques are similar in all .pdf editors, but their interfaces are different. You can process the same .pdf document in more than one tool, though. For example, you can use one to edit the text and another one to edit forms, update images or remove pages.
How to Edit a PDF
By default, .pdf documents open in Adobe Acrobat. If you want to edit the file directly from Acrobat program, here’s how to do it:
- Open Adobe Acrobat
- Select “file,” then “open…”
- Select your .pdf file from the document window and click “open”
- In the right-hand toolbar, click “edit PDF.” With Acrobat, you can edit, replace or add text, correct typos, adjust alignments, change fonts and typeface sizes, add superscripts or subscripts and resize paragraphs or text
- Find the text you want to edit and place your cursor on it
- At the top of the right-hand toolbar, click “format” to edit your text. For images, place the cursor on the image you want to edit and click the “objects” option in the right-hand toolbar
The Best PDF Editors
We’re going to give you three options to use to edit .pdf documents when you need to make important changes, and we’ll go over them one by one, starting with Adobe Acrobat.
Adobe Acrobat DC
Adobe Acrobat DC is a go-to .pdf editor. You can add a paragraph with a click or tap, fix typos, rearrange pages or even crop or swap photos.
It has full-page editing tools that adjust paragraphs automatically when you add text to a page and adjust the format when you add lines to bulleted lists. Its automatic spell check makes sure your edits are right, while the “find and replace” tool corrects every instance of a phrase or date you need to update.
Another nifty feature that no other app offers is the ability to match fonts on scanned images. It does that using optical character recognition and constructs a font from the characters it finds. That way, you can edit the text in scanned images using the same font, regardless of how old the font is.
Thanks to the Acrobat Reader mobile app, you can edit your .pdf from an iPad and enjoy the benefits of working remotely. A free seven-day trial is available if you want to try Acrobat DC’s powerful features, but make sure to cancel before it ends because you’ll get billed for it otherwise.
Though it’s expensive, Acrobat DC’s features are hard to beat. Adobe owns the market for photo editing, and if that interests you, our best photo editing software guide ranks the best choices. Still, you can get good results from cheaper options because the basic techniques are similar in all .pdf editors.
Microsoft Word
If you can’t afford Acrobat DC, you can use Microsoft Word to edit your .pdf file. If you own Microsoft Word 2013, 2016 or 2019, you can open your .pdf in the program and convert it into an editable Word document.
Once you’re done making changes, you can save the document as a .pdf file again.