Adding text while editing a pdf document causes bounded boxes to merge and corrupt the text.

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 12, 2017
3 replies
8613 views

Hi,

I've just started using Acrobate Pro DC and thought that editing a document was easy.

But it turns out that it's not.

The problem that's occurring is that when I add lines of text to a bounded box it flows into the

box below and corruptes the text.

I thought that Acrobat would take expand the box and shift boxes down, but it doesn't.

What is the proper to add text without corrupting subsequent boxes.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Correct answer Karl Heinz Kremer

Acrobat is not a desktop publishing tool - even though some people use it that way. As was already suggested, exporting to Word, applying the modifications and then converting to PDF again might be the best solution in your case. If that’s not an option (sometimes the conversion to Word also does not work right), then what I've done in the past is to copy the element you want to edit to a blank page, then apply the changes there (and you may have to reformat more than you like, and then copying and pasting the modified section back into the original page.

E

Exciting_build4096

Participant

Hey Everyone,

I know this is a long-standing issue, but I recently ran into it and found a solution that worked for me.

My PDF had a bunch of text boxes, and whenever I tried to edit one, the letters would become jumbled or corrupted.

Here’s how I fixed it:

1. I exported the PDF as a JPEG.

2. Then, I converted the JPEG back into a PDF.

Doing this forces the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan the new image and generate fresh, clean text boxes that are editable and no longer get corrupted.

Bonus tip:
If you delete part of the text and notice strange black smudges behind it:

Copy the text you want to keep.
Delete the entire text box.
Create a new one and paste the text back in.

Or, if you just want to remove a text box entirely, right-click it and select Delete.

Hope this helps someone else running into the same issue!

W

wvdeerhunter

Participant

I suppose there are a lot of people who are using Acrobat for the wrong reasons. I could certainly understand the phrase "Word is not a desktop publishing tool," but not Acrobat. It is exactly that. In addition, it seems that many people update to Acrobat Pro just so that they can do more with PDF's. Avoiding WORD at all costs is my motto. I should think that Adobe would want to avoid this issue. I would love to not have to open PDF documents in Illustrator order to fix a few minor issues, but the limitations on editing in Acrobat are tremendous. I LOVE it, but I would like to see more.

Karl Heinz Kremer

Community Expert

InDesign is a desktop publishing tool, as is Quark Xpress, Acrobat is a tool to work with PDF files. I usually call PDF to be a final file format. You do all your work in the publishing tool (and if you must, you use Word for that), but once the file is converted to PDF, you only make minor adjustments to the content (e.g. fix a typo here and there, update a number, ...). For anything more complex, you need to go back to your original document format.

Yes, sometimes you have to make due with the tools you have, and you need to make more changes to a document than what Acrobat was designed for, but then you need to be aware of it's limitations. Editing in Acrobat has improved over the years, but it's still very limited compared to what you can do in a tool that was designed to edit a document.

What complicates things further is that how the PDF file was generated also plays into how your document behaves when you try to edit it. A bad PDF generator can create PDFs that cannot be edited regardless of the capabilities of the editing tool. Sometimes you get better results when you convert your PDF pages to TIFF images, then import them into Acrobat to create a new PDF file, OCR it and then export to e.g. Word, edit in Word and then convert back to PDF.