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gigasaurus
Inspiring
September 6, 2024
Question

Best way to manage documents for business

  • September 6, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 705 views

I have never used Acrobat Pro (I use many other Adobe products). My wife has been using Acrobat Pro to take PDFs that she uses for her small business, make changes to the document and save as PDFs.  At a later date she reopens the PDF and elements have been moved around or regrouped (text from paragraph A will now be associated with paragraph B etc).  I am used to Photoshop, Premiere etc where I have a proprietary file format (PSD or Premiere file) with all data living in layers that are exactly as I left them last time I hit save.  This doesn't seem to be the case in PDF... elements seem to get crunched (jpgs get compressed etc) so when you reimport a PDF its not like opening up a PSD (which you keep as a master document).   Can someone recommend a better way to manage documents that need to be updated from time to time? Is she doing the right thing by re-opening them in Acrobat Pro to manage documents that need to occasionally be managed over time.   Is there some application she should be doing her editing in that allows you to manage a business document, and save in a lossless layered format?  Right now she is frustrated, because everytime she re-opens a carefully editied PDF in acrobat it doesn't seem to be exactly as she left it.  Thanks

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1 reply

creative explorer
Community Expert
creative explorerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 6, 2024

@gigasaurus   I am curious why your wife doesn't directly edit the original document and then save or export it as a PDF. For instance, as an instructor, I always work on the original Microsoft Word file of my rubrics, even though I'm not sure why I initially created it in Word instead of InDesign. When I need to make changes, I do so in the original Word file. Similarly, if I create a medical form for a client, I work with the InDesign file and save it as a PDF. This approach ensures that the final document is accurate and maintains its original formatting, as editing PDFs can sometimes lead to unexpected results like text reflow issues. 

 

m
G
gigasaurusAuthor
Inspiring
September 6, 2024
She has inherited a bunch of complex documents in PDF form and doesn’t have the time to recreate them all from scratch. She was happy when she learned she can open them in Acrobat Pro which has some sort of optical character recognition feature that converts things to editable text. But Acrobat Pro doesn’t seem to have a lossless proprietary format (similar to a PSD file) that facilitates maintaining documents over a long period of time. So every time she saves a document it gets crunched and she loses some of the structure she has worked on. I have just gotten involved because she gets frustrated every time she reopens a document and explained there is probably a better pipeline. Is there another Adobe application (like Indesign for example) that will allow her to open a PDF (which she inherited), perform the optical character recognition, edit and save as a maintainable Indesign file, then export PDFs as desired. The objective is to not start from scratch, as she has a large number of complex PDFs as a starting point. Thank you.

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S_S
Community Manager
S_SCommunity Manager
Community Manager
November 6, 2024

Hi @gigasaurus,

 

 Hope you are doing well. Thanks for writing in!

 

I would like to suggest saving the file for the first instance as an Optimized PDF.

You might want to try the steps:

Go to Menu-> Save As-> Optimized PDF-> try the below settings as shared on the screenshot.

 

 

More info around optimizing a PDF file available here: Optimizing PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro

 

Let me know if this helps.


-Souvik

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