Does Windows 10 have a way to edit a PDF yet?

"Chaya Eve" wrote

| I had seen this "edit pdf in word" document but it didn't work for me.
|
https://support.office.com/en-us/art...B-233379C2F63A

This is interesting. I often save contracts, estimates,
etc as PDF in Libre Office, to email to customers. But
it never occcurred to me that I might be able to edit
PDFs. I just opened an Asus motherboard manual. It
took maybe 30 seconds, as it was 84 pages. But then
I changed text in several places and saved it. It worked
fine. All this time, I never knew it could do that. I can
cut and paste images, and adjust their position and size.
The diagrams in that PDF can even be cut out in sections,
a line or shape at a time. It edits as easily as a DOC (though
that's not saying much) and can then be re-exported.
So far I haven't found anything it can't do.

Next I tried editing my 2016 state tax form. It doesn't
have editable fields like the US Federal forms do. I was
able to enter text into fields and save it, but the layout
got slightly garbled, so it wasn't useful.

So I guess the results may vary by PDF, much like the
results of DOCX editing vary in Libre Office.

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 13:21:31 -0400, Mayayana
wrote:

. All this time, I never knew it could do that. I can
cut and paste images, and adjust their position and size.
The diagrams in that PDF can even be cut out in sections,
a line or shape at a time. It edits as easily as a DOC (though
that's not saying much) and can then be re-exported.
So far I haven't found anything it can't do.

This is useful information because the MS Office ability to edit a PDF in
Microsoft Word only seems to work in Office 2013 and 2016 (and I only have
2007).

So if it works for you on a random document, that's a good evaluation.

What that might mean is that yes, finally, Windows (office actually) has a
way to edit PDFs reasonably well. At least as of Office 2013.

On 06/07/2017 20:39, Chaya Eve wrote:
On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 13:21:31 -0400, Mayayana
wrote:

. All this time, I never knew it could do that. I can
cut and paste images, and adjust their position and size.
The diagrams in that PDF can even be cut out in sections,
a line or shape at a time. It edits as easily as a DOC (though
that's not saying much) and can then be re-exported.
So far I haven't found anything it can't do.
This is useful information because the MS Office ability to edit a PDF in
Microsoft Word only seems to work in Office 2013 and 2016 (and I only have
2007).

So if it works for you on a random document, that's a good evaluation.

What that might mean is that yes, finally, Windows (office actually) has a
way to edit PDFs reasonably well. At least as of Office 2013.


Or you could buy Corel WordPerfect that has this facility as well.

On 06 Jul 2017, Chaya Eve wrote in
alt.comp.os.windows-10:

Does Windows 10 have a way to edit a standard PDF yet?

Or do I have to still find or buy a PDF to Word converter like in
the olden days?

Editing a PDF would be a job for an application, not an operating
system.

"Chaya Eve" wrote

|
| So if it works for you on a random document, that's a good evaluation.
|
| What that might mean is that yes, finally, Windows (office actually) has a
| way to edit PDFs reasonably well. At least as of Office 2013.

Did you understand I was talking about the
open source, free Libre Office 5? nothing
to do with MS Office, or Windows per se.

In article , ,
Chaya Eve says...

Does Windows 10 have a way to edit a standard PDF yet?

Or do I have to still find or buy a PDF to Word converter like in the olden
days?

A little bit OT, but have a look at the first five vids on the creation
of the PDF format (you can skip the HTML one)...

https://www.youtube.com/user/Compute...arch?query=PDF

Great stuff!

--
Duncan.

On 06 Jul 2017, Chaya Eve wrote in
alt.comp.os.windows-10:

Based on the answers so far, nothing has improved from what it was
five years ago. I was hoping that Windows would natively support a
PDF editor or conversion to Word like this promises.
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407353,00.asp

The article promises no such thing. It talks about Word supporting PDF
editing. The article is dated 2012 and talks like the feature is
already there in Office 2013 and Office 365. There is no mention of
Windows itself having that capability, nor would I expect it to - PDF
editing is a job for an application, not an operating system.

You do understand the difference, don't you?

"Nil" wrote

| There is no mention of
| Windows itself having that capability, nor would I expect it to - PDF
| editing is a job for an application, not an operating system.
|
| You do understand the difference, don't you?

TXT and BMP are also file formats edited by
software programs. But there are programs that
come with Windows to do that. Windows even
used to come with video software, though I
don't know if it was any good.

I guess the difference is that a lot of money is
made selling DOC and PDF software, while it's
easy to find free TXT and BMP editors.

On 06 Jul 2017, "Mayayana" wrote in
alt.comp.os.windows-10:

TXT and BMP are also file formats edited by
software programs. But there are programs that
come with Windows to do that. Windows even
used to come with video software, though I
don't know if it was any good.

Those are small, dumbed-down applications included with Windows, They
get you off the ground, but if you want to do anything in the lease
complex, you get something else. But in any case, Notepad and Paint are
tossed in extras, not part of the OS itself.

Windows Movie Maker, worked surprisingly well, at least for my limited
purposes! I understand that it had limited flexibility and if I
inevitably discoverd that I wanted to do something beyond it's limited
features, I'd have to move on to a "real" video editor. So, maybe
someday Window might include a PDF editor for idiots, but it would
still not be part of the OS itself.

I guess the difference is that a lot of money is
made selling DOC and PDF software, while it's
easy to find free TXT and BMP editors.

That, and the complexity of the operation. PDF editing isn't a trivial
process. Text editing, especially in Windows's early days, was a
crucial part of configuring and maintaining the process.

I would never expect Windows OS to include built-in PDF editing. An OS
is there to supply a platform for applications to do their job. To
include PDF editing in the core OS seems to me to be a waste of time
and a distraction from it's purpose.

"Keith Nuttle" wrote in message
news
On 7/6/2017 2:33 AM, Paul wrote: snip

I use PDFCreator but don't like the integration with PDF Architect, so I
have stayed with version 1.7.3


You can uninstall PDF Architect to leave PDF Creator as a stand alone
programme.
I use Ccleaner for the uninstall.

--
Regards
wasbit

On 7/7/2017 5:08 AM, wasbit wrote:
"Keith Nuttle" wrote in message
news
On 7/6/2017 2:33 AM, Paul wrote: snip

I use PDFCreator but don't like the integration with PDF Architect, so
I have stayed with version 1.7.3


You can uninstall PDF Architect to leave PDF Creator as a stand alone
programme.
I use Ccleaner for the uninstall.

I did not mention it, but I do not like the interface on the recent
version of PDF creator. That is why I have stayed with 1.7.3


Reading this thread shows that people do not understand the complexity
of the PDF format. They do not realize the PDF format is an envelop
into which you can put different things. If you have written a document
in WordPerfect, you can put that document directly into the PDF format.
Print that document to paper, scan it and put the scanned image into the
PDF format and the two files will look the same. However the one will
be editable, but the other will not be, with both documents having the
same security settings.

Had you locked the security settings on the document from WordPerfect,
neither would be editable. There are many combinations that can be put
into a PDF document.


--
2017: The year we lean to play the great game of Euchre

"Keith Nuttle" wrote

| Reading this thread shows that people do not understand the complexity
| of the PDF format. They do not realize the PDF format is an envelop
| into which you can put different things. If you have written a document
| in WordPerfect, you can put that document directly into the PDF format.
| Print that document to paper, scan it and put the scanned image into the
| PDF format and the two files will look the same. However the one will
| be editable, but the other will not be, with both documents having the
| same security settings.
|

Good point. That seems to be what the GIMP
option is about: Merely a convenient method for
taking screenshots in GIMP and pasting them into
PDFs. That's not the same as editing a PDF.

But I think it might still be confusing
the way you describe it. The PDF layout encoding
is very complex. A WordPerfect doc, or any other,
does not translate *directly* to that, as you put it.
An image is not a conversion. It's just a PDF with
an image in it. What we're really talking about here
is an actual translation/conersion, or the ability to
work on the actual PDF encoding.

Acrobat does that. Libre Office does that.
PDF Xchange Viewer can do it to some extent.
Apparently MS Word may be able to do it.

Often it's hard to tell how a PDF is put together
until one tries to export the text or edit the PDF.
Some PDF books, for example, are nothing more than
scans of book pages. To get the text one must do
an OCR operation on each page. Other PDF books
are fully PDFs -- a graphically accurate rendition
using PDF layout code, text and images. The full
text can be extracted from those PDFs.

I think a close correlate that's more familiar would be
a webpage. Someone who doesn't know HTML could
do something like make a Word DOC, take a screenshot,
then put that online in an HTML file. It might look just
a "real" webpage, but there would be no easy way to
have links, text couldn't be selected, etc. The page
couldn't be designed to self-size or have adaptive layout.
Because it's really just one big image filling the page, with
no HTML code or text.

There's a useful utility called XPDF that can extract
text, images, etc. It's a relatively easy way to check
how a particular PDF is put together, and to get at the
content. Unfortunately, the author only makes a
commandline version and saw fit to go along with the
file restriction flags.

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html

In the download, see pdftotext.exe and pdfimages.exe.
Last I checked, editors like Sumatra produced better
text than XPDF, but it may have improved, and the
auto-extraction of images can be handy.

There are also many ways to work with different PDFs.
As noted, PDFs composed of images can be run through
OCR to get the text, after the image are extracted. Or
even using screenshots if necessary. I use a unique
process with my MA state tax forms. The US forms have
editable fields. The MA forms are a monstrosity of user-
unfriendliness. (Ironic considering we're one of the top
US locations for tech business.)
The forms require little ovals filled in perfectly, and only
with a black pen! And text has to be entered as one
character per little box. Apparently the MA authorities want
to be able to machine scan the forms using some very
cheap-ass software. I want e-copies and need to have
at least 2 printed copies. And I don't want to risk confusing
their software. So I take screeshots of the forms,
open them in PaintShopPro, use PSP to fill in the forms with
text and little ovals, save them as BMP, then paste them
into the original PDF using PDF XChange Viewer. It's a bit
of work, but it ends up working pretty well as a way to edit
a PDF that's not normally editable. And the resulting PDF
prints just fine.

On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 08:13:14 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

Had you locked the security settings on the document from WordPerfect,
neither would be editable. There are many combinations that can be put
into a PDF document.

I used to remove those "security settings" habitually, in the past, with
GhostScript (I think I said The Gimp before but I meant GhostScript or
GhostView, as it has been a while).

Just out of habit, whenever I received a "restricted" use document, I
removed the restrictions pronto and saved them.

I could dig up the method to see if it still works, but it involved two
steps, one of which went page by page, and it converted the PDF to PDF but
without the restrictions.

On Thu, 06 Jul 2017 21:22:34 -0400, Nil
wrote:

I would never expect Windows OS to include built-in PDF editing.

Yet the OS includes built-in PDF creation from a file (which they call
printing but which is not different, in concept, from conversion of a file
format to a PDF file format).

On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 16:32:11 -0400, Mayayana
wrote:

Did you understand I was talking about the
open source, free Libre Office 5? nothing
to do with MS Office, or Windows per se.

Thank you for clarifying that you were talking about Libre Office and not
Microsoft Office when you edited an arbitrary PDF file.

In general I eschew non-Microsoft suites because of the compabitility
problem, but I took a look at it:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download...3.4&lang=en-US

I grabbed an arbitrary PDF on the net:
http://www.pitt.edu/~edindex/Office2...013Lesson1.pdf

As you found out yourself, after loading the PDF file into LibreOffice, it
was easy to make small edits (additions/removals/changes) to the PDF text!

But each line of text was its own separate object, it seemed, like a box of
toothpicks, lined up on a table, line after line after individual line.

Because each line was its own object, making large changes didn't work
well, and it saved as an "ODF" drawing file.

Likewise, copying large sections into MS Word 2007 also didn't work well,
but the lines copied over individually.

So LibreOffice is at least as good as Adobe Acrobat used to be at making
small edits to a PDF document.