Portable Document Format, better known among PC users as PDF, was first introduced back in 1993. For almost two decades since its “birth”, it has gained unprecedented popularity and has become not only used on computers running various operating systems, but also has firmly established itself as one of the most popular among mobile devices. Owners of e-books, smartphones and PDAs can no longer imagine their life without this unique and easy-to-use format. In this article, you will learn what PDF editing is and how to quickly and easily create a file in this popular format.
Initially, Adobe Systems developed this format so that users from all over the world can easily print text and graphics on desktop printers. But over time, PDF has become one of the most popular formats for various documents, which remains to this day. The creation of PDF documents usually occurs without the participation of “ordinary” users - a huge amount of electronic literature, various instructions, design projects or magazines are distributed in this format. But what to do if there is a desire or need for adjustment or small editing of such a file?
PDF editing can be done in several ways. Let's take a closer look at each of them, and then you yourself decide which option to choose for yourself.
The most common program for editing PDF files is software from the creators of the format (Adobe company) called Adobe Reader. This simple application allows the user to make small adjustments to ready-made files - delete or swap pages, rotate them and, if necessary, “crop” them. To perform more serious editing of its format, the same company offers users to use the Acrobat Professional programs and the popular graphics package Adobe Illustrator. Together, this software is a powerful tool for making changes to PDF files.
Many experts propose to perform PDF editing not in bulky programs from Adobe, but using utilities from third-party developers. Among them, PDF-XChange Viewer, PDF-Viewer and Foxit Reader are especially popular. In many ways, these programs are superior to “adobe” products - they require less RAM to work, and some changes (for example, adding comments and annotations) with their help make it much easier to make a finished document.
If not one editing program suits you for any reason, you can use one of the online PDF editing services. But due to the fact that this type of document processing requires sending the original documents to the server of the online editor, it is difficult to achieve confidentiality guarantees and exclude the possibility that unauthorized persons can read your document.
Finally, let's look at options that can be used to edit PDF in the "operating system" Linux. One of the most popular solutions is converting the pages of the PDF document to the “* .ps” format (this can be done using Okular, Kpdf, Adobe Acrobat and many other “viewers” ​​of our format). Then we open the received files in the GIMP application, edit and, using the psjoin utility, turn them back into PDF.
Other popular Adobe format solutions for Linux are PDFedit, PDFescape, and Flpsed.
In order for PDF editing to cease to be difficult and tedious, you can try working with PDF files in several of the ways described above and choose the simplest and / or most interesting for yourself. It should be noted that the developers of this popular format do not guarantee the stable operation of PDF files with programs from third-party manufacturers and recommend using exclusively products from Adobe.