Changing font color of elements that Acrobat doesn't recognize as font?

Question

Hi everyone-I work within healthcare and have a co-worker who struggles with dyslexia.  To help with this, printing documents in purple helps significantly in her ability to read healthcare clinic schedules. However, when saving the schedules, Adobe Acrobat recognizes the text blocks as individual image elements rather than text, making it nearly impossible to change the font to purple.  I was wondering if there were any others out there with dyslexia or are color blind who benefit from altering the color of elements on Acrobat and have found an efficient way to do this. I have tried converting the PDF to a Word document and can manage to get some of it to change to purple text, but since it is not being recognized as a font, I essentially have to put a "filter" on all the image elements. Additionally, the image elements are not combined as one single page but are segmented into small sections that make it very difficult to change the color or add a filter to multiple elements at once (even if using CTRL or SHFT). Any thoughts or suggestions? They would be greatly appreciated.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Accepted Answer

This can be done with a bit of customizing on an Acrobat Preflight Profile.

I would usually use Enfocus Pitstop for this kind of thing, as Acrobat's preflight profiles are a bit wanting in this department, but I HAVE cobbled one together that can make single spot colour file out of a full colour PDF. There may be better ways out there, but what mine does is convert the document, first, to an all greyscale (K) document, and then maps the K to a spot colour.

Like so (see vid)

If you want, I can send you the Preflight profile and you can test it on a file.

try67 · Answer

This type of thing really needs to be done in the source application, not in the PDF. Do you have access to the original file that was used to create the PDF? Typically it would be a Word file, InDesign file, HTML file, or even an image file.

If you do, make the changes there (if possible), and then create a new PDF from it. If it's an image file, though, you will need to use an image editor, like Photoshop, where replacing one color with another is much easier to achieve than in Acrobat.

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