Help cleaning up a supplied pdf

It’s situations like this where Astute Graphics’ Vector First Aid plugin can be pretty handy (and a major time-saver). Technically, from a purist point of view, PDF files are not meant for further editing. They’re only meant for document viewing and printing. However, we don’t live in a perfect world and clients are going to still provide artwork assets as PDF files or documents that need further editing as PDF files.

Some applications create PDF files that are more edit-friendly than others. Illustrator PDF files behave like a normal .AI file if the PDF file is saved with Illustrator’s default settings. PDF files from other graphics applications can be a real mess to open and edit. I don’t like opening PDF files that were created by Adobe InDesign. Artwork exported from Canva using the “PDF for Print” filter is often pretty bad, but not as bad as Canva-generated SVG files.

What makes matters worse is when the person who generated the PDF missed some critical steps along the way. An Illustrator PDF would be easy to work with, but if the person sharing the file forgot to embed linked images or forgot to outline live text objects that would force to me to work with the PDF data in the document rather than the Illustrator data that was appended to it. You have to place the PDF as a linked file, use the Flatten Transparency trick to outline live text objects and then dive in the mess of clipping masks and various sliced and shredded objects to organize it and attempt editing it. Vector First Aid can eliminate a lot of extraneous trash, such as unnecessary clipping groups and clipping masks or duplicate objects that are invisible. It can’t fix everything though.

Yoiks. Good luck.

Outside of doing it manually to sort out whatever the heck they did, I would just render it to an image, OCR it, then rebuild.

​@Evan vR that looks nasty. As per ​@Monika Gause if there are no groupings and clipping masks, personally, I would just create a new document all together. I would probably do it in InDesign and create a PDF from it, and then run a form on it. 

And next time it happens again, you will always have the originally file to use and export. It may take time, but it would be cleanest and easiest way versus manually going in and deleting what is not needed

So there is no group? Or clipping masks that contain certain versions?

Without seeing the Layers panel, can you select the top white object, hide it and everything above it.

Select all, delete it and Show All?