How To Edit PDF Files Without Adobe

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe inside the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents online according to Google (search intended for filetype: pdf).

There are the key reason why the PDF file format can be so popular for exchanging a lot of documents including presentations, CAD Paintings, invoices and even legal sorts.

PDF files are generally small (smaller in size) than the origin document and they preserve the original formatting.
Unlike Word and different popular document formats, the content of any PDF file cannot be altered easily. You can also keep other users from printing as well as copying text from PDF paperwork.
You can open a PDF file on any computer as well as mobile device with free software package like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins plus it can create PDFs.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives for you to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” automagically, there are ways by which you'll want to edit certain elements* of a PDF document without cost without requiring the source files or one of the commercial PDF editing tools similar to Adobe Acrobat.

We will primarily give attention to tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you're looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like puting in order pages or merging multiple Pdfs into one, please refer for this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.
A good Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need for making minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you should hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or should annotate a page with notices and freehand drawings.

You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape. com, an online PDF editor that may be free and also lets people edit password-protected PDF documents inside the browser.

With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of any PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text packing containers and sticky notes. You may add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.
[*] Hiding is different through redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of any PDF file but just hiding certain visible regions of a PDF file by pasting a good opaque rectangle over that region in order that the stuff beneath the rectangle keeps invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would choose to edit the meta-data associated* which has a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This can be a free utility that can allow you to edit properties of a PDF document like title, author name, creation files, keywords, etc.

The tool they can double for removing PDF passwords together with for encrypting PDF documents in a way that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF data. And since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor might be executed from the command collection, you can use it for you to update information in multiple PDF files within a batch.
[*] If you planning to share your PDF files on the net, you should consider adding proper metadata to everyone the files as that can improve the organic rankings of the PDF files in Google listings.

Edit the Text of any PDF File

If you want to edit the writing in a PDF file but don’t get access to the source documents, your best bet is you convert the PDF file straight 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 Yahoo Docs) and export the modified files into PDF format using any PDF writer.

If your PDF document is mainly text, you may use the pc version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the doc includes images, charts, tables along with other complex formatting, try the online PDF for you to Word converter from BCL Research or normally the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion as the latter service can take up to and including day though its yields far more accurate results.
Advanced PDF Touch-ups (Images, text, etc. )

Now that you know the basic PDF editing resources, let’s look at another list of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on the 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 and editor you also may use for typing text entirely on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps and that means you may use the tool intended for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on the PDF page.

Then you include Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that will natively import and export PDF content.

With Inkscape, you can select any object over a PDF page (including text, images, tables, etc. ) and move them completely to another location or even remove them permanently in the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF FILE files with Inkscape or draw freehand over a page using the built-in pen tool.

The next tool inside the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw while using PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing to help you easily fix typos in the PDF document or make format related changes like replacing coloring, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, for example.

Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice resource also includes support for annotations, designs, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you might have more choices and the software package 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.