I refuse to accept that PDFs were never meant to be edited

Two comments came to mind after reading the original post:

This is much tilting at windmills.

Fare thee well and say hello to the dragons for me!

I REFUSE to accept the answer tht PDFs were never meant to be edited. In Adobe's eyes, maybe. But, there is absolutely no reason that a comprehensive file format such as PDF cannot be edited in a way that is both constructive and not MADDENING!

Adobe Acrobat is a pile of crap for an editor. Just because they think it work perfectly fine does not mean that it works perfectly fine.

 

By @Aspire to Inspire

I think you are missing the fact that Adobe create the PDF specification. So they have a pretty good idea about what they meant it to be 😉  Which is electronic paper. You don't edit your paper documents do you?  You can mark them up, you can cut them up and paste the pieces on to a new sheet of paper, but you can't actually edit them can you? If you want to change a paper document you have to go back to the original electronic file and change it, then re-print. 

So this is the situation with PDF files, except you can make some small changes.  And as I stated earlier, there are other tools out there that are setup to "Edit" a PDF. You are just beating your head up against a wall trying to get Acrobat to do something it's not. And for no good reason. Using a real content creation tool is not a hardship. So don't blame Acrobat, you are the one whose trying to use the wrong tool for the job.  You only have yourself to blame for your failure. 

NO APPLICATION. NONE. Should EVER re-write, re-build, re-work what a human being does, unless expressly given the option. I have spent the past day, trying to move fields and corresponding text around in a single pdf file. Every single time I thought I had it working th way I needed it to, it concatenated the text areas, rewriting formating, leading, etc. making it IMPOSSBLE to move those fields without having to break up each and every text box AGAIN! 

To state clearly for the record, Adobe:

NO APPLICATION. Should EVER re-write, re-build, re-work what a human being does, unless expressly given the option to do so.

By @Aspire to Inspire

Adobe thinks in its perfect world that no one ever has to edit files that they do not have the original source document for and don't want to recreate documents that might be dozens or even hundreds of pages long, or even worse have fields in them that make the only option to edit being in Acrobat. It is like saying do it over or you'll be sorry.

I had hoped that when Adobe challenged Quark's monopoly for desktop publishing that they would learn from Quark's mistakes, but they have become far worse than Quark ever was.

Adobe and Apple are the Microsofts of the 90s. Their [cursing removed by moderator] doesn't stink and heaven forbid anyone dare challenge their omnipotence.