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

[charless79604441]

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.

[Bernd Alheit]

charless79604441  wrote

...

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

...

Add the text to the original document and re-create the PDF document.

[charless79604441]

Thanks for replying.

I don't have the original document.

It's a book that needs some sections to be updated.

I don't know how to re-create the document.

[try67]

You can't change how the application works when you try to edit a PDF file in this way (which was never meant to be, by the way).

If it works, great. If it doesn't, you have a problem.

To recreate the file you would export it to another format (like Word), edit it there and then create a new PDF from it.

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

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.

[wvdeerhunter]

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]

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.

[charless79604441]

Thank you Karl for your clear answer.

Now I have a better understanding of what PDF documents are all about.

[まゆみ36472062xnod]

Thanks for the explanation, though it makes no sense that a program which has been around for decades, HAS an editing function, and charges a substantial fee would force you to use other programs and waste hours of time for minor changes. Right now I need to italicize 2 words on page 29 of a 91 page text. Exporting to Word and reimporting in all likelihood will introduce differences with other pages--its not what one would ever want to do before finalizing a pdf publication which required hours to finalize with each change needing to be made in the right order so as not to cause problems. When italicized--using the edit function in Adobe--the rest of the text jumps half off the screen to the right and possibly up a bit. I have the same line, but properly italicized, on another page, but copying and pasting results in the same. Minor edits, no? Adobe can do it? No, it seems. Insane.