How to Edit PDF Files without Adobe Acrobat
Looking for software to edit your PDF documents? This guide describes
free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat that will help you edit and save PDF
files.
Convert Word Documents in PDF! w/ the Free PDF Converter for PC.
The
PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and
there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according
to Google (search for filetype:pdf).
There are several reasons why
the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents
including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.
- PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
- Unlike
Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file
cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from
printing or copying text from PDF documents.
- You can open a PDF
file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe
Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins
and it can create PDFs.
Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
While
PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can
edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the
source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe
Acrobat.
We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the
actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the
PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple
PDFs into one, please refer to this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.
An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks
Sometimes
you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may
want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading
it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand
drawings.
You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.
With
PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool
or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes
and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web
documents.
[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we
aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding
certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over
that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.
Change Metadata of PDF Files
If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit.
This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF
document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as
well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the
password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF
metadata cum bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you
can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should
consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help
improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.
Edit the Text of a PDF File
If
you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the
source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an
editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the
contents of the PDF.
Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft
Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF
format using any PDF writer.
If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza
to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes
images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF
to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.
Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)
Now
that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of
PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced
editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing
blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.
First there’s PDF XChange,
a free PDF viewer cum editor that you also may use for typing text
directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you
may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.
Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.
With
Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text,
graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even
remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF
files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil
tool.
The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension.
OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a
PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color,
increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default
font-family, etc.
Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also
includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc.
but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.
The
OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone
installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is
the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.
As an AdSense publisher, you are always looking for effective ways to maximize your site’s revenue through Google Ads but without hampering the end user experience.
In either of these cases, 
4. Create a Virtual Machine – Microsoft offers a free utility called 
