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Home / Software / How-To

HOW-TO

How to edit PDF files without

any hassle

Need to make notes in a PDF, or perhaps correct a few typos or

reorganize the pages? Here are the tools and tips you need.

By Anders Lundberg

Skribent, PCWorld DEC 5, 2023 4:30 AM PST

Image: Foundry
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Labelling PDFs

Merging PDF files

Converting PDF to plain text (and common problems)

Advanced PDF editing – changing text and images

Creating forms for others to fill in

Editing PDFs is something many people need to do, but unfortunately it’s

not always the easiest thing to do. The format is not designed to be easily

edited, and despite a plethora of Windows and web apps, there is no

universal solution beyond Adobe’s expensive Acrobat Pro.

Further reading: Best PDF editors

Labelling PDFs

Labelling is probably the most common way to edit PDFs. Many times

when sharing a PDF file with someone else, you may need to draw

attention to something by crossing it out with a ‘marker,’ adding a

comment, or drawing something in the document.

This type of editing is THE BEST PDF EDITOR

included in many PDF

programs that do not have

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other forms of editing. Both
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and popular third-party

applications such as Foxit

and Sumatra PDF support labelling and annotation. Full-fledged editors

like PDFgear, PDF-Xchange, and Adobe Acrobat Pro also have it, of course,

but so does the built-in PDF reader in Microsoft Edge.

Annotations and labelling are part of the PDF format and are saved

separately from the content of the document. This means that markups

you have made in one program will also appear in other programs, but

may look different. Lines, geometric shapes, and freeform shapes you

have drawn should look more or less the same, but even here there may

be slight differences. So unless you save a screenshot of how it looks on

your end, you can’t expect labelled PDFs to look exactly the same to the

person you send them to.

Take notes and mark up.

Image: Foundry

Here are the different tools you can use:

Text marking – coloring and crossing out/underlining

In some applications, you first select a piece of text and then click on, for

example, coloring. In others, you select the tool first and then select the

piece of text to be changed. In both cases, the text is colored or

underlined/overlined.

Graphic shapes – drawing with different geometric shapes

Draw in arrows, ovals, rectangles, rounded rectangles, lines, and other

shapes.
Draw freely – best with a pencil or touch screen

If the ready-made shapes are not enough, you can use drawing tools and

draw by hand with a mouse, tablet, or pencil if you have one.

Text

You can also add text on top of the content and change the font, size, and

style of the text. This can be used, for example, to fill in a form that has not

been made truly fillable.

Marked files look different in different programs. The same file as in the image above

looks like this in Preview on Mac.

Image: Foundry

Annotations

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An annotation is not a piece of text you have added on top of the regular

content of the PDF, but a special type of content placed at a point on the

page, linked to a piece of text that can be displayed in different ways in

different programs. Often you can see notes both in a box next to this

point (click to show or hide) and in a list of notes alongside the content

itself. It works much like comments in Word.

Further reading: Mastering PDFs: How to create, convert, and search

Reordering, deleting, and rotating pages

Reorganizing and removing unnecessary pages in a PDF is also a common

task. For example, a document you often print and you don’t want to

select pages every time, or a scanned book where some pages are in the

wrong order and you want to avoid confusion.

A related problem is documents where individual pages — or all of them

— are in the wrong order. Typically, scanned documents are printed in

landscape mode where you normally just turn the document and read the

page. On a computer, this is not as easy, so it makes more sense to rotate

the pages of the PDF so that the text and other content is in the right place

to read.

Deleting individual pages is also something you may need to do, and is

possible in most programs that can also rotate and move pages.

Moving pages.

Image: Foundry

Here’s how to move pages in PDFgear. It may work similarly in other

programs, but also slightly differently, so check the documentation or help

pages if you have a different program.

1. Click on the tab Page .

2. Click on one or more pages to select them.

 3. Drag and drop to move the selected pages. The program clearly

shows how they will be placed.

4. Click OK when the program asks if you really want to move them.

To delete pages, select them and click on Delete Pages in the toolbar.

Rotate works the same way, with two buttons to rotate either left or right.

Image: Foundry

If you don’t want to install a program in Windows, you can try the web tool

Simple PDF, which doesn’t upload the files but does all the work directly in

the browser on your computer. To move a page here, use the up- and

down-arrow buttons next to the thumbnails in the page list on the left.

Unfortunately, you can only move one page at a time, so if you need to

reorganize your document, this is not the most practical solution.

Simple PDF also has buttons next to the thumbnails for deleting and

rotating pages. This also applies to each page individually and there are

no functions for selecting and working with multiple pages at a time.

Merging PDF files

Want to combine the content from several PDF files into one? This can be

useful, for example, to collect all the invoices from a company in one file,

merge two files to be printed together, or insert a scanned copy of a

signed contract into the original PDF.

Of the free programmes I’ve tried, PDFgear has the easiest tool for this,

while Apple’s Preview is much easier for Mac users. Online tools such as

Acrobat Online and ilovepdf.com can work okay, but they sometimes put

the pages in the wrong order and you can’t easily select only certain

pages from one file to add to another.

Merge PDFs.

Image: Foundry

In PDFgear, open the first file and click on Page tab. Then select Insert
Pages > Insert PDF (you can also choose to import from Word or an image,

or add a blank page to make the document print correctly double-sided or

with two pages per sheet). Once you have selected a file, a dialog box

appears where you can already choose which pages to insert. You can mix

ranges and single pages — for example “1,2,5-8,12” to insert pages 1, 2,

5, 6, 7, 8 and 12. Here you also choose where in the document the new

pages should be placed — first, last, or before/after the selected page.

Once the pages are inserted, you can move them as usual (see above).

MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE

Converting PDF

to plain text
PDFgear
(and common
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problems)

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With other file formats that
PDFgear
have text, it is usually easy

to copy or export the

content to plain text — for example, to quote it in another text. This is not

the case with PDF. Seemingly simple things like highlighting a line of text

can be almost impossible as the PDF viewer gets the idea that the text is

actually two columns and when you pass a certain point, the entire left

“column” is suddenly highlighted.

Even when it understands that all the text is part of a text block and should

be highlighted line by line, there can be errors. When you paste the

copied text, it often has line breaks or paragraph breaks after every other
line, so that a paragraph does not behave at all like a paragraph in Word or

other word processors.

This problem has been around for many years and for some reason has still

not been fixed by any developer, even though it has worked in Apple’s

Preview since Mac OS X was released in 2001. Neither Adobe, Foxit,

PDFgear, Microsoft Edge, nor Firefox can handle it.

Something as simple as copying a few paragraphs of text and pasting it into another

program can cause problems if the source is a PDF.

Image: Foundry

I have tried a number of methods to fix this, and found two that work

relatively well in most cases. For single paragraphs, by far the easiest is to

copy and paste into a browser’s address bar, then select everything and

copy again. The address bar automatically removes all line breaks so the

result is a single piece of clean text with no formatting.

1. Copy and paste the text into Word or another word processor, with all

unnecessary paragraph breaks.

2. Find and replace double paragraph breaks with a special character or

a small text string that does not appear at all in the text, such as #@#.

3. Search and replace single paragraph breaks with spaces.

4. Find and replace #$# (or whatever you chose in step 2) with a single

paragraph break.

You can copy a paragraph mark by clicking the paragraph mark button in

the Home tab and then selecting one from the text.

For full pages or documents, I recommend trying one of the many pdf-to-

docx converters available on Acrobat Online, for example, and copying

from the resulting Word file. It usually works, but not always. Search-and-

replace to remove line or paragraph breaks can also work, but of course it

also removes paragraph breaks that should actually be there.

PDF files that are not text but scanned images must first be OCR scanned

before you can copy any text. Some PDF readers can do this automatically

as you read, but you can also use a program that scans the whole

document at once and converts it to text. This can be done with various

online tools or installed programs such as PDFgear.

Advanced PDF editing – changing text and

images

The PDF format was not designed to be editable. The content is not neatly

organized and PDF editors have to carefully make changes to the code so

as not to ruin the layout when changing text and other elements. But

where there is a need, there are usually solutions, and there are now a

number of programs that allow you to make changes to text, images, and

other things in existing files.

Really small changes, such as correcting spelling mistakes, usually go

without a problem, but with larger changes, the rest of the document can

still be messed up. So it’s best to always edit a copy of the file and make

changes step by step.

Of the free programs I have tested, PDFgear is the best in this area too.

The only major shortcoming of the program is that it is not possible to edit

already existing images. You can replace an image by inserting a new

image and placing it over the old one, but you cannot, for example, resize

or delete an image. This is something Acrobat Pro and some other paid

programs can do.

Edit text and other content in PDFs.

Image: Foundry

In PDFgear you will find the editing functions in the tab Edit tab. Of course,

to edit text you use Edit Text Add Text

. and Add Image add new text and

images, of course. Link -function is interesting. It allows you to draw a

rectangle which then becomes a link. The rectangle can be visible or

invisible and the link can go either to another page in the document

(useful if you have a book with a table of contents that was not created

with links, for example) or to a URL.

Inserting links in PDF files.

Image: Foundry

Edit Object -function works on editable objects that also include some non-

text, but as I said, I can’t change images and I haven’t found any other

graphical elements that can be edited. The developers of the program

have promised better support for editing in the future, so hopefully the

need for paid programs will decrease.

I haven’t found any free software for Windows that can remove or replace

existing images, but there is an online tool that seems to work pretty well:

Xara. You have to create an account, but all PDF editing is included in the

free version. Xara also looks decent for editing text and other things, so it

could be a decent alternative to PDFgear and paid software.

Create fillable PDF forms.

Image: Foundry
 Creating forms for others to fill in

Finally, we come to an area where Adobe’s Acrobat Pro is king, but where

there are decent third-party solutions these days: turning flat PDFs into

fillable forms. You’ve probably filled one out yourself at some point, and

appreciated how much easier it is than manually adding text or printing

and filling it out by hand.

There are some alternatives, both cheaper paid programs than Acrobat

Pro and web-based services. One example that I find works well is the free

service Sejda. It allows you to add text fields, checkboxes, and multiple-

choice menus. Text you enter in text fields can be removed when the file is

filled in and can thus be used to give instructions on how to fill in the field

without having to leave space for it outside the field.

This article was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared
on pcforalla.se.

Author: Anders Lundberg, Skribent

Jag skriver alla typer av av artiklar för M3, MacWorld och PC för Alla.

Vad vill du läsa om? Tipsa mig!

Recent stories by Anders Lundberg:

Mastering PDFs: How to create, convert, and search

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