I have a document I have to report on and it is a pdf. That I can’t edit. It is locked.
So I want to write the report in Libre Writer and I’d like the document onscreen, there in Writer, in the report I’m preparing, for easy reference for me.
But I can’t find a way to do it. When I bring it into Writer it doesn’t come into Writer at all but comes into Libre ‘Draw’.
What’s the best way for me to achieve what I want to do here?
PDF is by design an uneditable format, though there exist editors for it.
Due to the format definition, PDFs open in LO Draw as a set of graphic objects. Converting the text objects to a continuous text flow is tedious. You’d better open the file in a PDF viewer, select all and copy “as text” into the clipboard.
The clipboard can the be pasted into a blank Writer document. Check that you really paste text (if it doesn’t work at once, use “paste special” unformatted text). You get a document made of single-line paragraphs. You must then remove most of the paragraph marks to rebuild the human-relevant paragraphs. You must also restyle the text.
The “best way” to achieve your goal is to find and download a PDF editor adapted to your OS. If you can’t, proceed according to the workaround above.
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To have the PDF as image “for easy reference” (as OP mentioned in the question body) in Writer, the PDF may be inserted as other images; and that’s quite valid use … unless OP actually wants to edit the PDF (as mentioned in the title, which makes the question self-contradictory).