Can I edit a scanned pdf document?

I want to add text, move selected sections of a scanned document, and delete certain sections of a scanned document.

You can’t directly.

If you want to heavily edit the document (moving portions is qualified as the most difficult task), either use a dedicated application for PDF, or copy/paste into Writer.

  • open Writer (blank document) and your PDF document
  • select and copy text in PDF document
  • paste text into Writer document
  • repeat the two preceding steps as necessary

Before modifying the document for your purpose, you must “restore” text flow. When copied from PDF, text is returned as a sequence of 1-line paragraphs (instead of the original “logical” paragraphs). You have to erase the paragraph mark at the end of every line but the last one of the paragraph. This task is easier if you View>Formatting Marks.

The copy/paste operation also loses all formatting/styling properties (such as Heading n or font and size changes).

Graphic material must also be copied separetly.

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If your document is scanned as an image you can’t do.

Let OCR run across it, then editable text will be produced and you can move/delete/alter parts of the text.

LibreOffice currently can’t OCR but there are some programs which can do. Also there are some online OCR machines; recommended is https://www.pdf24.org/ which can do that; output as ODT file is possible (1st step: PDF OCR - Recognize text - easily, online, free - PDF24 Tools - 2nd step: https://tools.pdf24.org/en/convert-pdf-to). The service is for free, but bear in mind that data can be hacked despite https is used.