Editing text in pdf or eps

[Eric Ladner]

A few weeks back, the Forum provided some excellent help on pdf forms to be filled out online. Now I'm back, ha in hand, hoping for more suggestions.

It turned out that the job was not just creating online pdfs from formerly printed forms; it included reformatting them from 8.5 x 14 to 8.5 x 11, AND increasing the type size by a couple of points, going from two to six pages as part of the process.

For the first batch I had QXP files to work with, and, much as I prefer InDesign, it wasn't too bad.

But now, I've encountered a group of forms for which my predecessor inexplicably left only pdf and eps files - no QuarkXPress or InDesign. I do have Acrobat Pro 8 and Illustrator CS3, but the prospect of resizing and reformatting whole pages of forms, and legal-size pages of contract language is daunting.

Is my only option to copy the text into a layout program - or "Save as Text" and place it - and reformat it from scratch? Trying to edit in Acrobat or Illustrator seldom lets me select more than a couple of lines of text at a time - and sometimes only parts of words.

Or am I missing something important about how to use the software?

Would any of the third-party editors Google turns up help (preferably on the Mac platform)? Or could there possibly be "revcon" software to take a pdf back to page layout format?

As always, many thanks for any suggestions!