editing any files, particularly editing pdf files
Monday, March 10th, 2008
Can I edit a pdf file
It’s not easy but …
My Dad asked me how to edit a pdf. Here’s my response:
It’s not quite a “forget it” situation but nearly … I suspect that your scanner / copier is embedding images files (JPEG or TIFF) in a pdf “wrapper”. It’s unlikely that it performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on them, so the text you see isn’t in the PDF, it’s just a picture - you can test this by using the text selection tool (looks like a capitla I) in Adobe Reader and clicking and dragging over some text … if it’s text you’ll be able to select it. Or, you could send me one of the files and I’ll have a look (if you’re not my dad, don’t do this!).
Abbyy
PDF Transformer and Finereader
The leader in this area is a company called ABBYY (sometimes their software is bundled with scanners, so have a check and see).
They have a couple of products that would suit: