Easy Editing Of PDF Documents With OpenOffice

I briefly mentioned OpenOffice concerning editing PDF documents in Alternative PDF Readers and Writers. This article deals with actually how to go about it.

The Standard Edition of Adobe Acrobat is $299. That’s a lot of cash just to edit a preexisting PDF document. The OpenOffice way works with most PDFs and it’s completely free, so it’s a sound alternative.

A few quick questions answered up front:

Is this operating system specific?

No. OpenOffice runs on Windows, Mac and Linux – as do their extensions.

Will I be able to edit any PDF?

No, or rather a mostly-no. Some PDFs do have in-built security from the original author that prevents you from editing it – but that doesn’t happen very often. The only other instance is with PDFs that have fill-in forms. Those cannot be edited using the OpenOffice extension.

Does editing mean I can re-save a new PDF of the modified document?

Yes.

Editing PDF in OpenOffice

Step 1. Install OpenOffice

Self-explanatory.

Step 2. Download the PDF Import Extension

This will be a single file with the OXT extension.

Step 3. Double-click the downloaded file to install

Self-explanatory.

Step 4. Using PDF Import within OpenOffice

For this example we’ll use Writer, the document editor in the OpenOffice suite.

Here is the test PDF document I’m using for this article: http://www.pcmech.com/wp-content/uploads/test.pdf You can right-click and save this to test on your own computer if you wish, or use another PDF of your choosing.

Using the test PDF document, it will open a new window in OpenOffice and look similar to this (click image to view full size):

It’s most likely true the text will be a bit small to read, so be sure to adjust the zoom, seen at extreme lower right of the window.

From here you can edit PDF text on a line-by-line basis. Editing PDF text is not the same as editing a normal document. For each line you want to modify, you will have to specifically double-click it. When you do, a box will appear around the line with a blinking cursor. From there you do your edits. An example of this is shown above in the screen shot.

To save as a new PDF, click the PDF icon in the top toolbar. In the screen shot above you can see this directly under the word Format in the menu bar at top, to the left of the print button.

This may seem like somewhat of a chore just to edit a PDF, however the only other alternative that works as intended is the $299 Adobe Acrobat Standard software. It is worth it to learn how to do this and deal with the OpenOffice PDF editing limitations if you use PDFs a lot, as it will literally save you 300 dollars.