Without Adobe Acrobat How to Edit the PDF Files
PDF file format was most popular format for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices, government forms and other legal documents created by Adobe in the ’90s.
There are several reasons why PDF file format is so popular. PDF files are more compactable than the source document and preserve the original formatting. But the content of PDF files cannot be modified but we can prevent other users from copying text from PDF documents. Also, you can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device.
Free PDF Editing Tools
By default PDF Files are as “read only”, there are workarounds that let you modify any PDF document for free without the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.
We are focusing primarily on tools that let you alter the actual contents of PDF files. If we are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages/ merging the multiple PDFs into one.
For Basic Tasks an Online PDF Editor
If We need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For example, if we want to hide personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading on online may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
We can perform such edits easily in a PDF with PDFEscape.com, online PDF editor is free and also lets you edit password that protects PDF documents in the browser.
You can hide or escape the parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool/ add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages/ web documents.
Hiding is different from redaction because we are not changing the associated metadata of a PDF file by hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over the region that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.
Changing the Metadata of PDF Files
If we want to edit the meta-data associated with PDF document, check out the Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is free utility that can help to edit the properties of a PDF documents including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tools are used for removing PDF passwords and for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who knows the password can read the content of PDF files. since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, we can use it to update the information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
If you want to post your PDF files on the web, consider adding the proper metadata to all the files that helps you to improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.
Editing the Text of a PDF File
If we want to edit the text in a PDF file but we do not have the access to the source documents, the best way is that you can convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.
Then edit the converted PDFs in Microsoft Office and export the modified files back into PDFs format by using any PDF writer.
We can edit PDFs in Word, if your PDF document is text,then we can use the desktop version of Stanza to convert the PDF into a Word document. If the document includes the images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, then try for the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF.
Advanced PDF Editing
We know that the basic PDF editing tools, let's to look at another set of PDF editors that are free but can help some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document etc.
There is PDF X change, free PDF viewer and editor that you can also use for typing the text directly on any PDF page. PDF X Change supports image stamps so that you can use the tool for signing PDF files or images anywhere on a PDF page.
We have Inkscape, free vector drawing tool that can negatively import and export the content of PDF.
You can select any object on a PDF page With Inkscape and move them to a different location even we can remove them permanently from the PDF file. We can also annotate the PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.
In the category next tool is advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice with the PDFImport extension. This Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix types in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing / decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.
The OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc like Inkscape. here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.
The OpenOffice suite is a bulky but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when we do not have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.
PDF file format was most popular format for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices, government forms and other legal documents created by Adobe in the ’90s.
There are several reasons why PDF file format is so popular. PDF files are more compactable than the source document and preserve the original formatting. But the content of PDF files cannot be modified but we can prevent other users from copying text from PDF documents. Also, you can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device.
Free PDF Editing Tools
By default PDF Files are as “read only”, there are workarounds that let you modify any PDF document for free without the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.
We are focusing primarily on tools that let you alter the actual contents of PDF files. If we are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages/ merging the multiple PDFs into one.
For Basic Tasks an Online PDF Editor
If We need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For example, if we want to hide personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading on online may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
We can perform such edits easily in a PDF with PDFEscape.com, online PDF editor is free and also lets you edit password that protects PDF documents in the browser.
You can hide or escape the parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool/ add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages/ web documents.
Hiding is different from redaction because we are not changing the associated metadata of a PDF file by hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over the region that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.
Changing the Metadata of PDF Files
If we want to edit the meta-data associated with PDF document, check out the Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is free utility that can help to edit the properties of a PDF documents including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tools are used for removing PDF passwords and for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who knows the password can read the content of PDF files. since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, we can use it to update the information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
If you want to post your PDF files on the web, consider adding the proper metadata to all the files that helps you to improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.
Editing the Text of a PDF File
If we want to edit the text in a PDF file but we do not have the access to the source documents, the best way is that you can convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.
Then edit the converted PDFs in Microsoft Office and export the modified files back into PDFs format by using any PDF writer.
We can edit PDFs in Word, if your PDF document is text,then we can use the desktop version of Stanza to convert the PDF into a Word document. If the document includes the images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, then try for the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF.
Advanced PDF Editing
We know that the basic PDF editing tools, let's to look at another set of PDF editors that are free but can help some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document etc.
There is PDF X change, free PDF viewer and editor that you can also use for typing the text directly on any PDF page. PDF X Change supports image stamps so that you can use the tool for signing PDF files or images anywhere on a PDF page.
We have Inkscape, free vector drawing tool that can negatively import and export the content of PDF.
You can select any object on a PDF page With Inkscape and move them to a different location even we can remove them permanently from the PDF file. We can also annotate the PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.
In the category next tool is advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice with the PDFImport extension. This Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix types in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing / decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.
The OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc like Inkscape. here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.
The OpenOffice suite is a bulky but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when we do not have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.
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