"Open" pdf?

Let'sgoflying!

Let'sgoflying!

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Feb 23, 2005
Messages
20,316
Location
west Texas
Display Name
Display name:
Dave Taylor
is there such a pgm?
I can open and modify pdfs, save and send?

I have Cute pdf, that doesn't seem to.
 
"Open", as in free? Or "open" as in anything other than Adobe?

As to the first...been a few months since I looked, but I never found a great freeware or free open source program that was very powerful. I did find several that were much cheaper than Acrobat though. PDFtypewriter, and the full version of cutepdf being a couple.
 
I haven't personally tried Mac Preview to modify PDF, although I know the newest versions of Preview can do a lot of new and cool things. I'll have to try that. I am used to using Acrobat and Acrobat Distiller for all things PDF.

In my personal experience, Acrobat Professional is probably the only program you can open and modify an existing PDF, provided there isn't any password level security enabled on it. if there is, you might be out of luck unless you start re-typing the entire thing by hand (depending on the level of security on the document). Also, if a document was created by a scan and consists of images of text pages, you can't modify text at all.

There are some issues modifying text PDF in Acrobat: it's easy to screw up the formatting and make a big, huge mess. It's a lot easier to edit a source document and re-PDF. If it's a small thing, such as deleting a header, changing a page number, or correcting spelling, it can be simple enough.

Some PDFs are enabled for commenting with Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) but, that's editorial/review commenting and markup only.

Likewise, some are enabled to have form fields filled out using Reader, so you can fill in address, name, etc. and mark checkboxes and Save As a filled form, or print it to your printer.

But for a full edit, you would either have to copy/paste the contents into a text editor (OpenOffice, Word, InDesign, and the like) and re-PDF, or use the full version of Acrobat Professional. If your PDF is a one-shot deal, you might consider getting a 30 day trial download of the Acrobat Professional software from Adobe.com.

Hope that helps.
 
Along the lines of what Terzap said, Word 2007 can generate a PDF (the other office 2007 products can as well)...but this doesn't really answer the question about modifying an existing PDF.
 
I don't see the point. I prefer the read only function for most pdf files. If I create something, print it to pdf, and then publish it on the web, I would like to know that the risk of it being copied and modified is reduced. If I need to edit, then edit with the original program.
 
Sometimes a program like Inkscape is capable of opening PDFs, depending, as others have said, on the level of security.

Ryan
 
skidoo said:
I don't see the point. I prefer the read only function for most pdf files. If I create something, print it to pdf, and then publish it on the web, I would like to know that the risk of it being copied and modified is reduced. If I need to edit, then edit with the original program.
Click to expand...
Sometimes the original is lost. Other times you are using the features of Acrobat to create user fillable forms and do some picture editing. All of that can be locked with several types of document security.
 
skidoo said:
I don't see the point. I prefer the read only function for most pdf files. If I create something, print it to pdf, and then publish it on the web, I would like to know that the risk of it being copied and modified is reduced. If I need to edit, then edit with the original program.
Click to expand...

Sometimes the government provides a fill-able pdf.....which is in fact not a fill-able form. Oh, they goofed - they just said it was fill-able, its really not.

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/regulations/vs/iregs/animals/downloads/ee_cn_fe-cert.pdf

Sourceforge did not work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top