I've noticed that even text-only simple pdfs are always opened with Draw. This seems to me like a very inadequate way to edit PDFs. Here's the two disadvantages that are significantly bothering me:
All text appears in boxes, one box per line, which means you have to use the mouse to move between the line boxes.
Assigning styles with Draw simply does not work. If I select a text and give it the style "Heading 1", it fails to assign it. When clicking, it will show the entire document's text is in Heading 1, and then that it's gone back to Default. This makes it impossible to manage Bookmarks. (A corollary from this bug is that if the pdf already had a bookmark hierarchy, Draw will delete all the bookmarks!) This doesn't happen in Writer at all, however.
There seems to be certain bugs about fonts too, where a text looks nicely in Draw, but after exporting, the program selects a completely different font?
And so I ask, is there a way to open a PDF using Writer, so that you can edit it using its interface and not Draw's?
The simple answer is No. PDF documents are NOT meant to be edited. The goal of a PDF file is for printing and/or storing.
You can modify a PDF using an appropriate tool such as Adobe Acrobat, but that isn't the same as editing since blocks of text are set per page e.g. if you type more text it can not flow to the next page.
You can create an editable "PDF document" if you create a new document in LibreOffice and then export it as PDF with an OpenDocument embedded. This allows you to open the document as a PDF or really edit it by opening with LibreOffice Writer.
It looks Microsoft Office can import PDF into Microsoft Word program (similar to Writer). See: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office and search for "PDF Import". Interesting...
froz ( 2013-04-17 07:51:23 +0200 )editI'm having the same problem and can't find a free working PDF editor on Cnet or elsewhere either. I have ended up using other freeware to select all the text in the original PDF, paste it into a new Writer document, where I have to format it all but can edit text properly. Then I save it and use another freeware to convert it back to PDF.
It is a bit of a pain but I am only editing one long document, which I then will keep as a template, and only need to add small details each time before re-exporting to PDF.
Here is my workaround in full;
PP
You probably want Libreoffice PDF importer package (libreoffice-pdfimport for Debian/Ubuntu, I believe other distributives have it as well)
answered 2012-09-06 12:53:00 +0200
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I used to be able to open PDFs with Writer, but I just reinstalled due to a glitch, and now it's always popping up the "ASCII Filter Options" which it never did before. No matter what I select, I get characters, not images. How do I continue to view the pdf?
You have most probably used some extension or document was actually opened in LibreOffice Draw or you are using Linux where this extensions must be installed separately. Look for example: https://www.libreoffice.org/features/extensions/ there is: "Some Linux distributions provide these extensions as optional components; you can use your computer's package manager or software center to install them."
froz ( 2013-04-17 07:47:17 +0200 )editI am on a Ubuntu variant and I use xournal. Infact there are lots of tools available for ubuntu (and *nix in general).
May be this will help - http://www.ubuntugeek.com/list-of-pdf-editing-tools-for-ubuntu.html
If you are on Windows (and thats what looks like from the comments - I guess there is no easy way to do this. May be a virtual machine with Ubuntu and one of the tools mentioned above.
I use that method to create docs in Indian languages by having a Windows VM ( since the tool I use is available only for Windows !!).
Hope this helps.
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Asked: 2012-04-16 21:08:31 +0200
Seen: 11,966 times
Last updated: Apr 16
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See Pedro’s answer. If Draw is good at anything, it is viewing PDF files, but then again there are shortcomings; for example, the PDF’s embedded fonts are often not displayed properly.
CyanCG ( 2012-12-16 23:41:56 +0200 )edit