Participant

Question

Adobe PDF editor sucks

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
May 5, 2020
5 replies
6252 views

Want to reduce paper by removing e=xtraneous crap on a PDF, tough crap says adobe. Remove picture, still half a lage hole I cannot remove or or reduce, want weird uneditable bars that pop out and no way to remove, we have that for you! Clean up formatting and make a 2 page bunch of poop a nice single page, easy to read document, hell naw, you go buy expensive software for that. Adobe does none of it. Glad I dropped 100+ dollars on DC to zip, zilch, zero of what I want. You bet your ass I won't again!

B

Buddy22926961gvxi

Participant

I could not agree more. This product is an actual scam. Adobe Acrobat is only good for signing PDFs, beyond that it is poorly designed and poorly programmed by people that should never have been employed. This is the 5% of staff Zuckerberg was talking about laying off at Meta, just some underperformers putting out weak work.

J

johnw47097192

Participating Frequently

I second that the whole thing is just so dumb that I am sure a bunch of idiots made it.

I type and when I save everything I typed is gone.

I chose black but when i draw is grey.

Can't get worse than that.

ls_rbls

Community Expert

Would you mind sharing a screenshot?

Is kind of hard to assist without a visual.

Also, in which version of Adobe Acrobat is this happening, and which operating system are you on?

S

Smatik805

Participating Frequently

It is easier to edit a pdf online via https://www.sejda.com than using Adobes own tools (on WIN10). On Mac everything works like a charm but on WIN... oh man.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Bayine,

Sorry but while I do feel your pain, I also (apparently) have a better understanding the overall mechanics and structure of the PDF. The fact that we can do ANY of this editing in a PDF is truly remarkable. I've been working with PDFs since the very beginning and what we can do now is truly amazing.

You have to understand that Acrobat is not a page editor program. It's primary focus is to distribute digital copies of media to a wide variety of platforms containing a wide discrepancy of page sizes, fonts, etc.

If you really really really want to edit the content of a page to the degree that you want, you'll have to go to the original page creation program that made it. If you want to change a word here or there, you can do that with Acrobat.

However, here's one big tip: PDF pages made from websites: Go to a website called "Print Friendly" and do what you have to do to get the Print Friendly link integrated into your browser. Now, when you see a web page you want to make a PDF out of, without leaving the page, select the Print Friendly link. Now you will see your web page with more of a focus on layout and you can click on an add and delete it. You can click on any of the content and delete it. Then when you print or PDF the page, you will NOT have any empty spaces. The one negative I've seen with this is that sometimes (seldom in fact), it will remove images that you may want even before you get achance to decide if you want them or not. Despite that, this is pretty cool.

But again, Acrobat can no more do that than your car can fly and we've been promised flying cars for what, over 50-60 years?

V

Vladraconis

Participant

Hello, Gary,

In 2023 I created a resume with Microsoft 365. I then exported it as PDF.

In 2025 I wanted to edit my PDF. I have a paid Adobe subscription. Surprise surpise, pressing Enter DOES NOT move all the text in the document. Nonononononononono, it will only add a new line after the text you are editing. Oh, there was something else after it? Tough cookie, it's overlapped now.

Oh, you want to resize a text box so that it matches others ( why it did not in the first place, only Adobe knows ) ? Well, buckle up cowboy, and prepare your wrist for very fine movements, because damn the stars if Adobe has any kind of snap whe editing a PDF.

I ended up exporting it as .xls again to edit it.

Adobe's own PDF editor is unable to properly edit PDFs. And you pay money for that.

Fun times.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi, @Vladraconis, as I said back in 2020, earlier in this thread

"If you really, really, really want to edit the content of a page to the degree that you want, you'll have to go to the original page creation program that made it. If you want to change a word here or there, you can do that with Acrobat."

In the time that has passed since I wrote that, not much has changed in editing PDF documents. I'm not a programmer, and I do not work for Adobe. I try to help people in these forums. When a document is converted into a PDF, each text block (paragraph) is unique to any other. So, when you have that gap between paragraphs (such as what you see on this page), bridging that gap in a PDF is a big issue. I do not know why, but that's always been an issue.

If you still have Microsoft 365, open your original document and edit it. If you do not have your original document, export your PDF into Word, open it in Word, make your changes, and then resave it as a new PDF. That's what I and everyone else who tries to help folks in these forums do.

In a perfect world, Acrobat would be a word processor, page layout application, spreadsheet creator, computer-assisted document creator, and everything else that can be turned into a PDF. Until that time, we all have to work with what we've got.

I'm sorry,

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