I have a 12 pages .pdf file but when I open it I can only see and work with the first page. It includes a form with fields I have to fill in. I’d like to edit its margin so the text, form along with its fields will be bigger when printed.
PDF files are not meant to be edited (with the exception of forms). PDF is an “end format”, a display format at end of the document production chain. Every formatting in it is frozen to the state fit for printing or viewing (it is rather close to PostScript).
To retrieve the initial content to edit it needs specialised tools usually not installed by default. Many of them are commercial products.
For a simple solution, see if your printing driver offers the possibility to scale up printing (zoom factor > 100% with splitting on several sheets if needed.
A friend somehow did exactly what I’d like to do with microsoft Word. Is that capability not available yet with LibreOffice?
How can I view all 12 pages within the program?
You can open a PDF document in LO. It will be managed by the Draw component, one page at a time. To display another page you must click on the page thumbnail at left.
As I wrote, PDF files are “frozen” and LO considers them as graphic material, therefore the Draw component.
A PDF viewer is an adequate tool to browse through a PDF file. You can zoom in and out, fill-in forms, annotate the document, etc. However I doubt any of them allows to change content or formatting, apart from specific apps from Adobe.
There are many PDF viewers under Linux besides Acrobat Reader. This latter app, at least, is freely available under many OSes.
I saw those thumbnails once but I accidentally closed it, how can I reopen those tumbnail options?
View>Page Pane
The question is about changing the size of the pdf pages and displaying the remaining pages besides the first one. The proposed answer is “PDF files are not meant to be edited (with the exception of forms). PDF is an “end format”, a display format at end of the document production chain. Every formatting in it is frozen to the state fit for printing or viewing (it is rather close to PostScript).” How this can be seen as an answer to the question is beyond my comprehension.
It is common to have PDF files with margins that are not adequate. One example is scanned pages in PDF format that don’t print correctly because the printer can’t print the whole surface of the paper. To circumvent this, one can set up an empty document in LO with margins corresponding to the printer margin (0.31" is OK in my case). An imported PDF will then be automatically formatted to fill the area, resulting in adding 0.31" to all margins.
Regarding the remaining pages, it doesn’t seem possible to select pages in LO like it is in other programs importing PDF files, such as GIMP. The solution is then to extract all pages to single-page PDF files and import them one by one. Under Linux, you can use pdfseparate for this. For example, I have a multi-page score that has been scanned, but the pages are slightly larger that what the printer can print. I used the following command:
pdfseparate MemphisStomp.pdf MemphisStomp%d.pdf
which resulted in 10 separate files named MemphisStomp1.pdf to MemphisStomp10.pdf. I can now create a new file in LO, set the four margins to 3.1" and import the ten files. Each imported page is automatically sized to the margin, resulting in a file that prints without problems.
I often use this technique to fill PDF forms that have not been saved as forms.
If you don’t have a PDF editor allowing you to extract pages, you can simply print each page to file, which will produce the same result.
@peewhy That sounds desperately time consuming.
In the Adobe Reader print dialogue you can choose a scaling size for printing or just select Fit to margins, changing margins in the pdf is not necessary.
If you really want to change margins in Draw:
- Open Draw and open the pdf. You should be able to see all pages, if not and you want to then press View > Page pane.
- Click in a blank area of the one of the pages of the pdf, left margin is best, then in the Sidebar click the Properties icon. You will see Page Properties and in it a field labelled Margins, click in it and choose a suitable margin preset, all the pages will change to it.
Tested on LibreOffice 7.1.5.2