[Solved] Converting PDFs to Writer?

[Rozlynmac]

Welcome beginner. What is your question or comment?
Please try to briefly and clearly tell us: What you want, What you tried, and What happened.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, I have a PDF document I need to edit. I only have Adobe Reader on my computer, so can't save the document as a.doc. I'm trying to find out if it's possible in Open Office to convert PDFs back to .odt or suchlike? I can find plenty information on saving .odt as .pdf which works perfectly for me - I'm using v3.0 I believe.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

A query with 'open edit pdf' gives the following results. Several relevant threads.

Thanks to add '[Solved]' at beginning of your first post title (edit button) if your issue has been fixed.

[Rozlynmac]

Thanks Hagar, I'll try some of those ideas and the import extension this evening & will set the topic as solved if they work. If not I'll update with whatever goes wrong.

Cheers

[TheGurkha]

Bear in mind that the PDF extension is for making small corrections to PDFs, such as correcting typos, it isn't really suited to making significant edits.

I have had some success using Zamzar (a free on-line conversion site) in converting PDF to .odt. Depending on the complexity of the layout of the PDF though, there may be some tidying up you need to do in Writer to get it looking just as you want. But once you have done that you can re-create the PDF from weithin OOo once you have edited it. It's always better to re-work the source material and create a new PDF than it is to directly edit a PDF. They weren't designed to be a malleable document like a word processor document - they were supposed to be more like 'an electronic printout'.

PDF Extension

Edit: Also, the PDF extension only allows you to load PDFs into Draw and Impress, I believe. Not Writer.

[Rozlynmac]

Thanks for the pointer on zamzar Ghurka, I used it & it did a lovely job. I also used some of the other tips I'd been given & found in other threads as identified by Hagar. I tried pdfxchange, I don't know if it was me or the programme, but everything it offered me was useless, rendering the covnerted file largely illegible. I ended up using the OOo extension for the PDF import - took a couple of attempts, but putting it into Impress worked better than Draw. It was quite a large PDF, so I spent an hour or so re-formatting some of the text etc as it had gone a bit weird. But once it was done & my text added in (which was quite substantial), I saved it as a new PDF & it worked beautifully. I wasn't sure what I was doing last night when I first tried it, but the advice I'd found eventually sunk in & I realised what I was being told to do. The best thing was that once I'd worked it out, I could keep re-saving the PDF every time I spotted a formatting error I'd missed - just correct the Impress file & re-save overwriting the PDF. Zamzar would actually have saved me a few hours work, but it took a while for the converted file to come through & by the time I actually read your post I had a midnight deadline approaching, so not enough time to wait & see what Zamzar produced and then start adding & re-saving. However, if I ever have to do similar again, I think I'll try the Zamzar option first & see if it saves me time!

Thank you both for your help. I don't know what I'd have achieved without this forum.

[TheGurkha]

Thank you both for your help. I don't know what I'd have achieved without this forum.

We're all pleased to help.