Creating and editing a former building floor plan saved as a PDF

[BrockJL'sQA2022!]

Hello everyone. I have been tasked with updating a building floor plan for my company. We currently have a floor plan saved in our system as a pdf and i was wondering if it is possible to open the file up in illustrator and have the ability to edit the former diagram?

[Kurt Gold]

Have you already tried to open it?

If so, did something go wrong or did you see unexpected things?

[BrockJL'sQA2022!]

I have opened it but it will not allow me to edit the picture. 

[Monika Gause]

Is it embedded?

Is it maybe a clipping mask?

Can you check the Layers panel - what it is?

[John Mensinger · Accepted solution]

A PDF can contain just about anything, so while Illustrator will read the file and interpret the contents, there are no guarantees as to what you can do with it from there. It may be a raster image (made up of pixels, like a photograph; Illustrator can't edit that), or, if there is vector data that is not Illustrator-native, it will likely be contained within one or more clipping masks. You can release those clipping masks (Object > Clipping Mask > Release), to make their contents accessible, however, it's possible there are multiple levels of masks nested within each other, and it's also possible they contain hidden objects that you wouldn't want un-hidden, potentially many of them...and some or all of those could be raster images.

Because it's simply not possible to predict the result of opening a PDF (that didn't originate in Illustrator, or wasn't purposely saved with 'compatibility' options enabled), it's often repeated here that "Illustrator is not a general-purpose PDF editor".