/t5/acrobat-discussions/can-t-edit-some-text-in-pdf/td-p/9587358Dec 19, 2017
Dec 19, 2017
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I have a PDF that was given to me to make some minor text edits. I don't have the original doc.
I open the PDF in Acrobat DC, then choose Edit PDF. The text in the document is inside various boxes, as you expect. I have the Show Bounding Boxes option checked. But there is this one bit of text that I cannot select. It doesn't have a bounding box around it, so I can't do anything with this text.
Is this a bug in Acrobat? Is there any way to fix this? I tried exporting to Word, but formatting gets so messed up, it isn't a good option. I would be happy to put a box with some text over the text I can't edit, but you cannot set a background color in a bounding box, at least not that I can find.
Yeah we do PDF forms all the time. But a form field with read-only text in a doc where it 'should' have been just text, that's just junk that wasn't needed. That's why I didn't look at the form editor; this doc wasn't supposed to have fields there.
There is a real world application for read-only text forms fields. Very often, JavaScript is used to selectively make a text field read-only or fillable based on previous activities in the form. It is actually quite useful although it obviously is a problem if you don't know about it and you are trying to edit a PDF file.
- Dov
- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
No such js in this doc. And it isn't a user form type of doc. This was just some previous person messing around and leaving me a problem to solve. Not the only one, this PDF also had features that caused Acrobat to put up font error messages, the ever popular "unknown error" message, and even crash a couple of times. It's a fun one!
It looks like this form might be used by many different law offices and each law office can easily change the address to their particular office. As noted this is a real world application of having one form that can be updated for a specific location. Note that the field's value is set by using the "Default Value" on the form field's "Option" tab. This approach is used to keep the field's value if the form is reset. If I were creating this form I would have included form fields for the dates, social security numbers, and client names filed in if the client wanted to.
I think you guys are missing the idea that this isn't that kind of document. It isn't a "form" in the sense of PDF forms. All the rest of the text is static, and when they want it changed, they threw it over to an Acrobat person to edit changes directly in the text. Maybe someone else was trying to get to what you are talking about, but they didn't, and now that the doc is mine to maintain, I have to fix leftover issues.
When you start "editing" text you might come to appreciate form fields. Editing text is not always as easy as it is in Word. If your system does not have the exact font for the text you are attempting to edit, you cannot edit the text. Also PDF text does not flow like it does in a Word document.
Maybe the "left over issues" are because you do not understand the PDF format.
If you need to edit PDF documents, it is far easier to go back to the document in the authoring/creating application and edit it there than to even use the PDF editing tools.
Did you see this little quote of mine from above? "This is why I prefer starting with origin docs,"
Maybe you don't understand what I mean there, I am referring to "the document in the authoring/creating application"...what I would have liked to use if they were available. But they are not. So we edit the PDF. And we deal with all the issues, which are problems with the doc, or Acrobat, not us.
That doesn't work. Not sure if this is a side effect of June Windows updates, but I cannot edit any text in any pdf documents. There are a mishmash of image and text borders. Text that I have been able to edit regularly for years will not edit now. When I convert the tiff to acrobat, the whole document is an image and no text is editable. I'm using Acrobat Pro XI. I hate DC.
Tried this but after conversion to .tiff and opened as pdf, some fields got deformed. I saved it as .jpg instead the edited in Paint (covered the text to be edited) then converted back to pdf. Problem solved.
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