Editing pdfs

[Mike]

A publisher asked me if I could correct a mistake in a pdf file. 5 was asked to change the word 'evening' to 'afternoon'.

Making the change was no problem except that the text was justified and the line then extended too far into the right-hand margin. I couldn't see any way of changing the tracking or the size of the spaces between the words in order to reduce the line length.

In the end I had to import the page into InDesign and set a new line of text to overlay the old one, then export the page as a pdf and insert it into the original file.

Is there a way I could have done the whole thing in Acrobat.

[LoisWakeman]

Only by editing the PostScript I think - at least, your experience matched mine, though I only have v6 so far. You might possibly have been able to manually enter thin spaces where the normal ones were - but I doubt that'd've given you enough leeway.

I have used, with some success, Solid Documents' PDF converter to turn PDFs into Word and edit them. Unless you have a very complex layout, this can be effective.

[FlipSide]

acrobat pro 8 has the "TouchUp" feature which has saved me countless hours to date with this feature alone.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by FlipSide

acrobat pro 8 has the "TouchUp" feature which has saved me countless hours to date with this feature alone.

That's what I'm using but it doesn't seem to have the ability of justifying a line of edited text.

[FlipSide]

I tried this with some justified text...it went left aligned by default (so i had similar problems). using touchup, if you right-click > properties while the text is selected, you can change a few options...character spacing. (shout out: a few align options here adobe would be nice!!)

have you tried dragging it into illustrator? that would be more friendly as to justification issues and can be faster than ID (although the exact fonts are needed on your system). good to see some other people making the "stick-on" edits in ID. lol

[Kelvyn]

Also effective is Infix

I have found this is a good lightweight application and enables small changes to be made very quickly and easily.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Kelvyn

Also effective is Infix

Looks interesting but seems to be Windows only.

[Robin Springall]

The big application is PitStop Pro, by Enfocus, but it's also a big price! If I can't get at the original program used to create the PDFs, I also find I have to just bite the bullet and open the PDF in Frustrator. Be careful, though, as text can often change.

You'd think that, after all this time, Adobe would improve the text touch-up tool. It's much better with Windows, but with Macs it's very common to get an embedding issue with the text you've just changed.

[Mike]

The original program was InDesign but the publisher wasn't supplied with the ID file - just the pdf.

Fortunately I had a similar font - MT Centaur rather than Adobe Centaur. Interestingly, Acrobat didn't seem to mind and allowed me to edit the text.

When I tried setting the replacement line in ID the differences between the two became more apparent. At least, I imagine it was the differences between the two versions. I had to set the MT Centaur at 11.2 point with 48% additional tracking. Could be that the original was set like that but it does seem a little unusual.

[FlipSide]

yeah, i've had TONS of stuff like that that needed nearly every tweak to the fonts that was possible with a live font. I think its probably saved as a default on the original artists prefs. I used wingdings (with percentage/tracking edits) for some quick icons and that became the default font when i drew a new text box (feckin annoying!) ...got it sorted though.