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Editor for PDFs: recommendations, please?

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rjbull:
An addendum to this thread: the company bought Acrobat 9 Standard, and to my dismay, it can't really edit PDFs as you'd expect a word processor to.  This from its Help:


"It’s a fact that Adobe® PDF is unlike other document formats, in which you can freely copy, paste, and move text and images on a page. Instead, consider a PDF as a snapshot of your original file. Use Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Standard to touch up and enhance the file for readability and distribution, and reserve more substantial revisions for your source application."

--- End quote ---

The Advanced Editing TouchUp Text Tool is very hard to use.  It deleted text I hadn't marked, and screwed up formatting when I tried to add anything or to close up gaps.  Adobe 9 does not really convert into Word DOC format either.  The DOC output is only RTF with the extension changed, and very minor internal changes from "official" RTF output.  These RTFs do not always import properly into Word, which sometimes locks up with "This application is not responding" messages.  Strangely, they will import into WordPad 5.1, and if saved in WordPad, will then import into Word.  They needed much editing, especially of tables, so much so that it might have been better to get a skilled person to type parts of the file from scratch.

I briefly looked at the PDFXchange Web site, but it didn't look as if it offered editing.  Maybe I was in too much hurry.  Next I tried Edvard's suggestion of Foxit PDF Editor - three cheers  :Thmbsup:, it works very well by comparison to Acrobat 9.  Editing still tends to be fiddly and time-consuming, but at least I can get what was wanted done.  At the time of writing Foxit are still offering a 10% Thanksgiving promotion, reducing the cost from $99 to $89.

f0dder:
Perhaps you'd been better off using ABBYY FineReader to OCR the documents into word format? :) Iirc it supports PDF source, and it has definitely worked wonders for the OCR jobs I've used it for at the museum. Not exactly cheap, though.

rjbull:
Perhaps you'd been better off using ABBYY FineReader to OCR the documents into word format?
-f0dder (November 25, 2008, 06:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

I didn't think of that...  I more or less gave up on translation to Word after Acrobat itself, Zamzar and Convert PDF to Word.net all failed to give usable results.  Sometimes I've wondered if there's a problem with the originating app.  I suppose the more complicated the source, the harder conversion will be.

Lutz_:
PDF editing is obviously very iffy - since PDF is a dedicated output format.
That said in my experience Adobe Acrobat is the worst product I have tried (horrible interface). I can only imagine it is need for some high, high, high end options that perhaps others do not offer. For everyday tasks I believe other programs are far better; I have tried the Foxit editor and was impressed; I am using Nitro PDF Pro (got it very cheap at Fry's) and am very satisfied.

Darwin:
Lutz_, no doubt I've asked this question and received an answer (from you or others) in the past, but does Nitro PDF also convert pdfs that are comprised of scanned images into searchable pdfs? Essentially, this would require the developer to ship Nitro PDF with OCR capabilities... I need a PDF solution for my XP machine and Scansoft won't do it (somehow manages to mess up the text in some of my applications - renders dialogues and things like the taskbar icon text into KOREAN?!).

Like the new avatar, BTW  :Thmbsup:

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