I’ve tried the minimal word processor AbiWord several times over the years, and recently I tried it again, while putting it on a system I was about to give to a newbie. I discovered a feature that I really like. When you save a document, it become mydoc.abw. But when you SAVE AS, you get a long list of choices, and one of them is mydoc.pdf. Not “export”, just “save as” pdf. When I did that, I saw that the file name at the window top had changed to mydoc.pdf, and I could still edit it. I made some changes and clicked SAVE, and it saved a new version of mydoc.pdf. The original mydoc.abw was not affected by this. So, a pdf file created by AbiWord is fully editable! If I open mydoc.pdf with Libre Office Writer, it displays it but it’s not editable. I have a lot of tasks where AbiWord is going to save me a lot of time! I hope I’m not the only one who didn’t know this before.
Did you test a .pdf file not created by AbiWord? Can it read it?
This .pdf editing is an important issue. There are very few free apps that can edit .pdf files. You may have made the discovery of the year.
I had not tried that until you asked, but the answer is …… not really. It will edit a pdf from another app., but it mangles it! It only opens the text, and fonts are changed to Times Roman, formatting is gone, graphics are gone, and if you save it after changing the text, it will be saved in the new AbiWord version with no graphics. But if you want to CREATE a pdf, it’s a good way to do it.
OK, I get it. Text only.
So it is one step better than Latex… it will create a pdf and you can edit that pdf , but not foreign ones.
Latex will create a pdf, but if you want to edit it, you have to go back to the Latex source.
Looks like the full solution is still only available non-free or online.
or Adobe online
There are other half solutions at LibreOffice, Okular, and Xournal++
I need to add Onlyoffice. It edits PDFs and does even including graphics.
Doesn’t editing in those also create flaws in it? It probably depends what the elements are in a pdf… I have made pdf from jpg and unsurprisingly also not quite editable. What I am trying to illustrate, doesn’t a pdf editor always have to translate some scripts?
So I really wonder if adobe (or foxit) do it flawlessly?
Pdf is based on Postscript. Postscript is a language, so, in theory, you can edit it because it is text. I have, long ago, written Postscript with vi.
There are parts that are not text, eg imported images… they are binary. I think all you could do there would be delete or replace an image.
Some software has more capabilities than others.
Lets make a list in order of reducing capability
- Adobe
- Foxit
- Master pdf editor
- … end of nonfree
- OnlyOffice
- Xournal++
- Abiword
- LibreOffice
- qpdf
- Okular
- Vi and any text editor
Does anyone want to reorder the list?
I am not sure if any of these editors convert a pdf back to postscript to edit it, but that would be the best way to do it.
Or resize them and/or move around…
I met pdf’s containing scanned pages, but stored as image.
Their texts are not editable with anything - directly.
We have Gimagereader to “read” those texts beforehand, end then it’s possible to edit… not the pdf itself, but the text.
If qpdf qualify to the list as editor, I’d add Pdf-shuffler too.
While it does not allow to edit pdf contents directly, but it’s awsome to reorder (even remove) pages, merge pages from other files.
OK
OK
- Adobe Acrobat ( thanks @daniel.m.tripp for correction)
- Foxit
- Master pdf editor
- … end of nonfree
- online free pdf readers(Adobe, ILovePdf, Canva)
- Master pdf editor … free version
- OnlyOffice
- Scribus
- Xournal++
- Abiword
- LibreOffice
- gImageReader
- pdf-shuffler
- qpdf
- Okular
- Vi or any text editor. (very limited)
Perhaps you should add on line free pdf editors such as
Or
https://www.canva.com/pdf-editor/
Adobe even offer there own
Occasionally I have used one as a last resort for a quick change on a pdf document but simple stuff such as adding a banner if à event is cancelled or the hours, date location change without access to the original file. So no idea about more complex documents.
I have also used libreoffice but that converts the pdf to an image file in the drawing program and not much use for change dates times but ok for adding the cancelled banner I had created.
I would not use any online solution for editing my files.
As it implies to upload it first, do some edit there on the server, then download it back to me.
I’m not saying the owners of the server really steal my data, but they are definitley able to…
So I’d never do that, except maybe something that I intend to publish, make it available for anyone.
Never thought about them taking the content, but as mine are for images I put on the web site of our association so public domain and not copyright and of little value to anyone outside unless they plan to come to an event, limited market.
But I do protection our pages to stop right click copy once on line, but that is for another reason. More to do with internal politics in our village.
Unfortunately the best free pdf editors are probably the online ones.
I need to explore converting the pdf to postscript and editing that
, then converting back.
I read that pdftops is better than pdf2ps.
Editing postscript requires a knowledge of the language.
How did we come to be welded to a document format that is so difficult to work with?
I think the main goal of a pdf is that it’s portable -as the name suggests, and it fulfills this indeed. Once you export something into pdf it will look the same everywhere.
I like to think of it as a final output format, just like a printed sheet of paper.
Normally we don’t want to edit a printed paper.
As it is just a file, it’s still editable, it’s just a complicated procedure.
Has anyone used Stirling pdf
It requires docker.
There in is a history …. No doubt some may know different…
PDF originally was a printer (postscript) description file (format) due to packing fonts and different types faces into a filé that the printer could use and the printer. So you created one for a epson and a different one for a Apple laserwriter.
Then adobe made it available with a reader to display on screen.
Apple used suitcases at one stage. Mainly for printers as in large scale printing not desktop stuff.
Microsoft had another system which did not really take off but cannot remember its name.
As if by magic
This weeks newsletter had an item on
I worked around that, had a (old) copy of photoshop and the few times I had to change something and it didn’t work, I opened it in photoshop, copied a white square over it and the corrected text in the same font over it. I guess with gimp which I use nowadays that would work too. For simpler pdfs I often used an online editor…
So you edited a pdf as an image. It was probably a pdf obtained by scanning… they are almost entirely image. I am not sure what would happen with a typed text pdf if treated as an image?
It makes from it what you wish. Though on the inside it probably looks completely different. I have used it in both ways to work around websites’ flaws as well. I created a newspaper for my club, but I couldn’t post unless I made an image of it. With either graphic manipulation programm one can turn pdf into jpg and vice versa.