S
safety123
I have Adobe Reader (free), but am looking for a reasonible priced
Adobe editor.
Any good suggestions?
Adobe editor.
Any good suggestions?
M
Mike S.
J
John Williamson
Although it's officially for registered users only, you can download a
working copy of Adobe Acrobat 7 pro from Adobe's website until they
notice the traffic it's generating and shut the door. There's no support
for it, though, so you install it entirely at your own risk. It works
well on XP, with Vista next up for installation here when Vista finishes
updating itself, but as I don't have a working Windows 7 machine at the
moment, I can't confirm that it will work under Windows 7.
They may decide to leave the door open and use the older version as a
sales promoter for the latest, paid for, version.
This search string (Without the quotes) "pdf editor freeware download"
gives about 3,740,000 results in Google.
R
Rene Lamontagne
Sumatra works ok for me.
Rene
Q
Quilljar
I have found Nitro Pro 8 for about 60 GBP is excellent
with good free support too
Quilly
with good free support too
Quilly
L
lawman3
I can't find the page on http://www.adobe.com where Adobe Acrobat 7John Williamson said:
can be downloaded. Could you post the actual URL address for this
page?
Thanks
Q
Quilljar
V
VanguardLH
I found version 8 Pro for free here:Quilljar said:
http://www.techspot.com/downloads/4683-adobe-acrobat-8-free.html
I don't use Acrobat so I don't know if this download works and if the
product keys they give will work. Adobe is up to version 11 (XI) so
these are old versions with no support.
V
VanguardLH
I just downloaded and tried to install the Acrobat Pro 8 from techspotVanguardLH said:
into a virtual machine. The install pukes claiming that 8.7 GB isn't
enough free space to install the product. I re-downloaded and it worked
that time. Must've been a corrupted install the first time.
Apparently the first "install" is just to deposit the real installed
(under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat8). So you run through 2 installs.
The second one (under C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0) is where you
enter the product key. Then delete the first "install" folder.
I scanned the pre-install files (the ones from the first "install") at
virustotal.com (just the .exe and .dll files). No infections found.
The 460 MB data1.cab file was too big to scan (they have an upload file
size limit of just 32 MB). After the 2nd [real] install completed, I
scanned the new executable files. Still no malware reported.
I'm assuming the techspot download is legit (not pirated). Although
webhosted at a USA provider (Softlayer), the site's admin is listed in
Ecuador. I don't have long experience with TechSpot to know if they are
trustworthy. Ecuador (regardless of where they get webhosting services)
is high on the list of piracy countries; see:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate
If you believe it's pirated, report it to Adobe at:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=anti_piracy
While I can report piracy to many sites, still many allow only the
product's author to report it (e.g., Youtube).
If you want to be safe (don't believe virustotal.com or want to ensure
you have a non-pirated copy), get the version 7 from Adobe's page.
You can compare the features in three versions (8, 9, and 10) in the
following PDF doc from Adobe:
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2011/04/whats-the-difference-between-acrobat-8-9-and-x/
I found this for v7 versus v8:
http://www.ehow.com/about_6591015_adobe-acrobat-7-vs_-8.html
H
H-Man
Acrobat 8 does work in Win7 but requires an update, which it will do
automatically, and a bit of massaging.
LibreOffice can edit some PDFs, works well if the structure isn't too
complicated, and much more capable than even Acrobat pro. But only if it
reads the PDF properly. Still a work in progress I'm afraid.
L
Lemon
Microsoft Word can turn a plain document into a plain PDF file.
I don't know if it does more advanced formatting or any Adobe JavaScript.
And MS Word is only reasonably priced if you've already paid for it! But
if that is the case, you can save a Word document as a PDF file.
Lemon
P
Philip Herlihy
I have the full-fat version of Acrobat, and that doesn't do much in the
way of editing beyond touching up text - the usual process is to create
the document in another application and then convert it (usually by
'printing') to PDF.
There are several free PDF pseudo-printers out there - I've used PDF995
in the past, but I see Foxit Reader now has PDF creation capabilities,
so that's probably worth a look.
If you want to make significant changes to a PDF document (without the
source files for the originating application) you might try Serif's
excellent PagePlus, which can open PDF files. I've had limited success
with this, though. Nuance is another software house which makes PDF-
capable applications.
J
Juan Wei
Philip Herlihy has written on 5/1/2013 11:13 AM:
It might be possible to scan it into Word, edit it and save as PDF, maybe?
T
Tim Slattery
OpenOffice / LibreOffice can also save to PDF format.
Don't know for sure either, but I would be quite surprised if Word,
OpenOffice or LibreOffice can put in Adobe Javascript.
P
Paul
NoJuan said:
It might sound like fun, but it's a lot of work proof-reading
and correcting stuff. The computer works for us, not us for
the computer. This would be doing it the hard way. (I know,
as I've tried it a number of times
)I've even tried the OCR that is built into Adobe Acrobat, and it
is not that good. Any time you use OCR (optical character recognition),
the errors made require proofreading and correction. Which takes
all the fun out of it. Imagine having to change instances of "O" to "0"
or vice versa. When a mistake happens, it's frequently hard for
humans to notice the error too.
*******
The problem with PDF (and PostScript), is they're programming languages.
There are an infinite number of ways of doing things, with a programming
language. That makes PDF docs hard to edit.
Take an example - this is PostScript, but it's the same idea.
This is "Hello World" in PostScript. PostScript uses Reverse Polish
Notation (RPN), so involves a stack. And in this example, the operators
are not obscured at all. This is written using nothing but the language
constructs provided. You can also write subroutines, and any decent
code is at least three layers deep with subroutines. Subroutines make
the code very hard to read when you're in a hurry.
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
/Times-Roman findfont 50 scalefont setfont
180 360 moveto
(Hello, World!) show
showpage
Now, if an editor program sees that sequence, it is "love at
first sight". If an editor was showing this object on the screen,
you could click on the string "Hello, World!" and the whole
string would be selected. You could copy it, edit it, and so on.
But some tools that make PDF, render one character at a time.
If the editor sees that output, then you have to select items
one at a time. Now, it's a pain in the ass to edit the text.
You can only select one letter, and change the value,
select the next letter, change the value, and so on.
(H) show
(e) show
....
A font can also be made, by "drawing a glyph" with segments.
LibreOffice does that for ligature character sequences. If
you had your PDF editor in that case, you could not click or
wipe over the string and copy it. The letters would appear to
be vector artwork, made from a lot of line segments. You'd
be pissed, and blaming the editor for making such a mess.
Yet, it is not the editor tools fault.
The LibreOffice people, could have used a "real font", but
instead, decided to "bodge their own". And that is why it
is done that way. The method gives decent print quality,
but still is less than ideal for editing purposes.
Since there are so many ways to make text appear on the screen,
no tool could possibly recognize all the idioms, tidy them up
and make them useful to the user. For example, the case where
the letters are rendered one at a time, a tool could try to
"gather them together" intelligently, but occasionally it's
going to make mistakes. Just the variable spacing between
letters, can confuse such efforts (telling the difference
between the space character, versus a custom line spacing).
So while it's fun to pretend there is an all powerful
tool out there, you may not be too happy with the results.
You could get to learn a lot about how documents are
formulated, distracting you from actually working with
the content.
I owned two tools for editing PostScript documents (and
you can distill PostScript to make PDF). I had a copy of
Tailor for Macintosh, and I had a copy of Coreldraw.
Coreldraw crashed on the first complex PostScript document
I gave it to work on. Tailor worked fine. Tailor only
had about one release, and perhaps sales were too poor for
the developers to continue (if they developed it for another
five years, it might have been a kick ass product). What
I learned from Tailor, is some editing jobs would be
relatively easy, and some would be virtually impossible.
I have low expectations for the approach now as a result.
Editing something which is a programming language, is
doomed to failure.
So if someone asks me now, I would say "great if you're
a hacker, and have all day to waste, not so great if
you just want to get a job done and move on".
*******
Some of the tools here, claim to be able to import or
export PDF. You can browse through these. Try to find
an evaluation copy first, rather than spend money. The CorelDraw
I bought years ago, cost a fortune, and was *the* worst
purchase I've ever made, in terms of value for money.
I should have applied for a refund. Currently, CorelDraw
is available as an evaluation copy, so you can try it out,
and see if there are fewer bugs than the version I
bought many years ago (when PostScript editing was
introduced). To run CorelDraw, you might need .NET 4
on the machine, and in turn, .NET 4 needs Windows 7 SP1.
I think the problem I had, was .NET 4 would not install
on the original Windows 7.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors
If you do find a purpose-built PDF editor, it's bound
to cost a fortune. You won't be getting that function for
$39.95 or $99. And any tool that coincidentally happens
to edit PDF, you'd better use the evaluation version first,
because it could be a dog of a program.
*******
If you want to learn more about PDF as a programming language,
Adobe provides docs for both PostScript and PDF. The first one,
for PDF, is 1300 pages long.
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf
On page 389 of the first document, you can see how PDF
draws text. I've modified the example slightly, to show
how the ideas are similar, and the names are changed a bit.
This example cheats a bit, in that there is some font setup
that was done elsewhere (for font F13). The Tf call, is
changing the font size to 12 point font, just before the
string gets drawn.
BT
/F13 12 Tf
180 360 Td
(Hello, World!) Tj
ET
A document painted that way, would edit pretty nicely.
Even a crappy editing tool would do a decent job.
And if you need a test file for the editor, try this one
It's not really that complex, but it's still an eye opener.
And this is not the print output of a document either.
This is actually written in PostScript, like you
write a computer program, and is then distilled.
That's why the file is relatively small.
http://ecee.colorado.edu/~kuester/smith/smith.pdf
Paul
G
Good Guy
J
Juan Wei
Good Guy has written on 5/1/2013 8:49 PM:
Converter, yes.
Editor????
Printer, yes.
Converter, yes.
Editor????
R
Rob
I use Adobe Acrobat Pro and even that can only do very limited
'editing' of PDFs.
The real problem is that PDFs are a display format, meant only
for viewing. Depending on the amount of editing you need to
do, the chances are you will need several PDF tools and at least
one decent word processor in which you will effectively
reconstruct the document in an editable format, and use SaveAs
to PDF format when you are finally done.
HTH