Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me answer the question,
How do you Edit a PDF on your Mac?
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to
MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us
and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So this is one of the questions I get asked the most. Say you have a pdf, you open it up in the
default app which is Preview. How do you now edit that pdf to create a new modified version? Well,
the answer is you really don't. You don't edit a pdf. Instead you edit the source document. So
here's what you've got. You've got a pdf document opened up in Preview. You could do a lot of things
with this pdf document. You can highlight it. You can annotate it. You can export it. You can
even rearrange the pages. But what you can't do is actually edit the content of the document.
You can do some things that fall under the realm of Markup. For instance you
can put a white box over something or add a text box on top of something. But you can't
edit the content that's already there. Not really. So how do you edit a pdf document?
Well, first understand exactly what a pdf document is. A pdf document is very much like a printed
sheet of paper. If you had a printed sheet of paper somebody gave to you and said can you edit
this and give me a modified version. You would simply ask them for the original document. Right.
You wouldn't take that printed sheet of paper and try to edit it. Even if you scanned it in it would
be a scanned image. You want the source document. Well a pdf is essentially the same thing.
Think of it as a digitally printed document. It's still a file. But it's just like a piece of paper.
It's meant to be permanent, this thing that you can't change. That's makes it really useful.
You can fill a document with fonts, formatting images, all sorts of things. Send it to somebody
else and not worry about what they've got on their computer. If they have those images. If they have
those fonts. Even what type of computer they've got. The pdf should look the same just like if
you gave them a piece of paper. It wouldn't change just because they were holding it instead of you.
So let's start at the beginning. When you create a document you're in an app
and you have a document open. The app could be any document creation app. For instance,
you could be creating a document in Pages, in Word, in Illustrator, InDesign. There are all
sorts of apps that you could use. You could even be saving or exporting a pdf from a web browser.
Whatever you're using to create the pdf that's the actual app you're using and you have the
document in it. That's the source for the pdf. So let's look at what happens when you work with the
document. You would have that document in the app and then you would say, Print It. You would send
it to the printer and then you would get a sheet of paper with the document printed on it. Now the
same kind of thing happens when you make pdf. You don't need a printer. You're not printing
a physical piece of paper. But you are exporting to a pdf document. So how do you edit that pdf?
Well, the way you do it is not to work with the pdf document itself but
to work with the original document. So you go back to the app that you were using,
you open up the document, and then you export a new version of that document. The problem
comes when you're not the person who created the original document. This often happens. Somebody
creates a document. They were using something like Pages or Word. Then you end up with the pdf. Then
somebody tells you to make a modification to that pdf. Truth is you really can't do much to modify
the pdf. It's just the same as if it was a piece of paper. You need to find the original document.
So whoever asked you to modify it you need to ask them if they have the original document in
whatever format it was created in, Word, Pages, InDesign, anything. Then, of course, you have
to hope that you actually have that app that created that document else you're out of luck.
In some cases the original document is lost. Maybe you created it a long time ago and saved
the pdf but didn't bother to save the original document. Or maybe the person
has the pdf has no idea where it came from and now you're stuck having to basically recreate
that document in whatever app you choose. It seems that since it is a digital file, since it's a pdf,
there should be a way to deconstruct it and get it into Pages or Word but there's really not. It's
the same as if it were a piece of paper. You're going to have to start over again and create
a new version of that document. Maybe this is an opportunity to make the document much better,
not just changing what needs to be modified but creating a whole new version of it.
But you don't necessarily have to start completely from scratch because usually in a pdf you can
select things. Like you can select text. So it's just a matter of selecting that text and pasting
it into new text boxes in Pages, Word, InDesign, or whatever. So you shouldn't have to retype
things. Hopefully you can quickly reconstruct the document in the app of your choice.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.