China’s Gerry Jingrong provides some ideas for working with read-only Adobe Acrobat PDF files and Microsoft Word files– what do you do when you need to edit or revise an un-editable PDF file?
AS WE ALL KNOW, ADOBE ACROBAT PDF (“portable document format”) is the best format for viewing and sharing documents, it is widely used by computer users. However, due to PDFs special feature – un-editable, what will you do if you need to edit or revise a PDF file? The following 4 ways can help you edit PDF files:
Edit PDF through Gmail
Recently Gmail added a solution may solve this problem. If you received an Email with PDF file attached, you’ll now get a “View’ link along with the previously existing “Download” link, click it, the PDF Document will be turned into to HTML. Open the HTML file in Microsoft Word and choose Save as .doc. At this stage, you can edit your read-only PDF file in Word Pros: Free
Cons: Complicated, only compliant for one single PDF file conversion
Convert PDF online
Now there are hundreds of websites that provide online PDF to Word conversion service for free. You need to upload the PDF file and enter your email address. Then the converted word file would be sent to your mailbox after several minutes. You can edit the word document after conversion. You could try Zamzar from www.zamzar.com or the free PDF converter online at www.freepdfconvert.comPros: Free
Cons: Slow, not compliant for the conversion of confidential PDF files
Commercial PDF to word converters
This is a kind of software specially designed for converting PDF to word. A good PDF to Word converter supports conversion of single file, batch files, and also selected pages. It helps users preserve the original layout of text, graphics and images after conversion.
Pros: Time- saving, simple, affordable
Cons: Not Free, $20-30
Edit PDF in Adobe Acrobat
Everyone knows that Adobe Acrobat is the professional tool to create PDF, and it is a piece of cake to edit PDF file in it. You can open your PDF file in Adobe acrobat, edit it directly, and then save your PDF file. However it’s an expensive software, you need to pay a high price to purchase, and get familiar with all the features first. Many users complain that use the Adobe Acrobat make their computer run slow and it eat up a lot of disk space when the file saved. So it’s the first software we may thought when edit a PDF file, but the last to choose. Pros: Famous, professionalCons: Not Free, $229 or above
Research the software before using
For some reason, PDF converters have proliferated in China. There are tens of thousands of them, mostly good, but some bad. You have to be very careful and use only those which are solid and recommended in software forums — so research carefully. Recently there have been many such programs which, unfortunately, have stealth malware embedded like keystroke loggers which can capture IDs and passwords, and then send that identity info to the home site. Keep in mind that Microsoft Word dot-doc files frequently embed your computer’s directory tree and private information — depending on the configuration. This can be utilized by online criminals to hack back into your computer.
As mentioned above, we may find there are many ways to edit PDF files, so don’t worry again when facing problems concern with edit the PDF file, just follow the way which you think is most suitable.
Gerry Jingrong
Gerry Jingrong posted this article from the Guangdong province, China, using Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; SU 3.22; InfoPath.2; IE7Pro; CIBA; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; yie8; MAXTHON 2.0) Gerry has several years experience in PDF solutions explorations. You can get more information about PDF, at Gerry’s web site: www.anypdftools.com
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