What's the fastest way for me to alter PDFs?

February 21, 2022 7:58 AM

I was just promoted and now one of my new tasks at work is to QUICKLY alter pdfs... what's the fastest way to do this?

I already know how to alter the PDFs, but my method takes too long. I need to take PDFs that I receive and change the logo heading at the top + change the contact information listed in the middle.

what I do:
1) I take the PDF, convert it to a JPEG, then open the PDF-now-Jpeg up in Paint.net.
2) I take the Heading of our other company which I have saved as a Jpeg, and use it to cover the original heading on the PDF-now-Jpeg.
3) Then I open up Word or Libre Office. I insert a text box and change the background of the textbox to White.
4) In the text box, I type in the new Contact information. Then I copy the text box and paste it onto the paint.net PDF-now-Jpeg.
5) The contact information is now pasted into paint.net and I drag the white text box to the appropriate part of the form.
6) I save the new altered JPeg file with the new heading and contact info.
7) Now I convert the altered Jpeg file to a PDF, and send it back to management.

I'm not going to go into the details of why we do this because it's a long drawn out explanation regarding several companies under the same umbrella company. I have to be able to alter these PDFs SPEEDILY. And the process that I use is just too drawn out. how can I alter multiple documents a day like this quickly? I can download other programs if that would help.

If I could somehow cut out the part where I convert it to JPEG and back to PDF that would help too... but wherever the time cuts can be made would be appreciated.

posted by fantasticness to Computers & Internet (25 answers total)

Adobe Acrobat will allow you to edit the PDF directly.
posted by phil at 8:01 AM on February 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

Response by poster: I should also add- It does not matter in the least if the finished product looks fake as hell since everyone involved already knows it's supposed to be edited. Speed is the important thing- not looks.
posted by fantasticness at 8:02 AM on February 21, 2022

PDFs are not meant to be human-editable. The ideal way to alter a PDF is to get hold of whatever file was used to output the PDF, change that file, and output a fresh PDF.

If this is not available, the best application for wrenching open a PDF is Adobe Illustrator. Using Illustrator you can open the file, see the pieces making it up, and change them. A PDF file will not be organized in any way a human would do it, so you need to do some preliminary work releasing clipping masks and ungrouping unlikely groups before working on it.

Also you may find you do not have the fonts used in the file. Or that some of the text has been rendered to outline.

If you don't have access to Illustrator, your own method may be the best workaround. Although the suggestion of using Acrobat is also not bad. But you'll need Acrobat Pro, not the passive Acrobat Reader.
posted by zadcat at 8:04 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's different contact info every time, right?
posted by trig at 8:04 AM on February 21, 2022

Response by poster: Yes it is different contact info each time. the heading logo of the different compan is the only thing that remains the same which is why I can save it as a Jpeg and just used that saved file each time.
posted by fantasticness at 8:07 AM on February 21, 2022

Your current process sounds nightmarish. Get Adobe Acrobat and you can do all this very easily.
posted by zoetrope at 8:10 AM on February 21, 2022 [16 favorites]

I have this online PDF editor bookmarked. I've never had occasion to use it.
Small PDF
posted by Carlo at 8:18 AM on February 21, 2022

If you can't afford or install Adobe Acrobat for whatever reasons, but you ARE allowed to use cloud services, then use Google Drive.

1) Go to drive.google.com
2) Upload your PDF
3) Open the PDF in Google Drive
4) Choose "Open With Google Docs"
5) Edit document. You can insert images into Google Docs documents or copy/paste text, whatever's simplest for you.
6) Choose File > Download > PDF Document (.pdf)

This will also let you re-edit the Google Docs edition to make new PDF versions, if necessary.

I edit PDFs infrequently, and Adobe products are expensive, so this is how I do it.
posted by All Might Be Well at 8:24 AM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

If you're avoiding Acrobat, for some reason, I think you could cut out a few steps using the tools you have coupled with some free/low cost online services as follows:
1. Split PDF into component pages.
2. Download pages that need to be changed and convert them to JPEGs (or, depending on the service, directly to Word). Leave the window open with all the other pages to await your return.
3. Set up a working Word document with tiny margins and with the default to center both horizontally and vertically. You can use this blank file over and over.
4. Import the page JPEG into Word using the copy/paste function with the mountain.
5. Paste in the graphic (logo, contact info, whatever).
6. Save as PDF with new name.
7. Upload the new PDFs into the open window. Replace/reorder/delete old pages as necessary.
8. Merge and download new compiled PDF.

There are tons of online services to do the spitting and re-compiling tasks. They all have different user interfaces and you'll find one you like with experimentation. Some have a limit on daily uses-- defined as documents by some and time by others--before requiring a subscription. Some let you establish the name of the download file while others assign it, which adds an additional step since you'll have to change it to reflect your organizing principles. Watch out for the ones that stick their logo on your document. When this situation comes up I just google the problem and pick one more or less at random, but I remember liking sejda.com and smallpdf.com.
posted by carmicha at 8:26 AM on February 21, 2022

If you don't want to do this online (e.g. via Google as suggested above), I just tried doing this via Inkscape and it was pretty quick and easy. You can only open one PDF page at a time (unless this has changed in newer versions than I'm using), but it sounds like that's what you've been doing currently?

Are the coordinates of the logo and contact info box the same in every document? If so it might actually be able to automate some of this process (though I don't know how offhand - I'm thinking in the direction of imagemagick or postscript tools or even commandline inkscape).
posted by trig at 8:53 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Honestly, if I were you I would remake the document in Word (assuming it's just blank with a header/logo) as much as I could, then just use and edit that to generate PDFs. It sounds like the company would benefit from doing it like this rather than asking someone to edit PDFs and it blows my mind that you haven't just been given the original Word document template to edit (but also doesn't surprise me, as a former admin assistant who had to do shit like this, sigh).
posted by fight or flight at 9:08 AM on February 21, 2022 [17 favorites]

Open the PDF directly with Word and it will convert it to an editable format. It works surprisingly well.
posted by knapah at 9:08 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

If the logo and contact info are in the identical location on each document the process should be scriptable. Look at the open source imagemagik. If you're not a programmer it may be a challenge to set up but it would essentially run instantly, so it could be very worth the effort.
posted by sammyo at 9:18 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Try opening the PDF directly in Libre Office Draw. It's surprisingly good for making changes to PDFs.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:23 AM on February 21, 2022

Here's how I think I might handle it: make up a Word document template with the new jpg logo header at the top. Open up the PDF you want to alter and size it was big as you can while still fitting the whole page on the screen. Screenshot the part below the old header (I use Snip and Sketch, it's a nice simple screenshot utility) and paste it into the Word template below the new header. Then insert a text box to enter the new contact info and save the file as a PDF directly from Word.

If you use the same contact info for multiple types of files, then you can have new logo + contact info as part of the template or templates, in a borderless text box with its text wrap set to "in front of text", and then when you paste in the screenshot set the wrap type on the pasted image to "behind text" so the contact info box will show up on top and you can drag it to where it needs to sit.
posted by drlith at 9:26 AM on February 21, 2022

I need to edit, annotate, reorganize pages, redact, date stamp, obtain signatures, etc. for work documents so my employer set me up with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. It’s not free but if you're using it daily, it's worth it and it's super easy to use.
posted by kbar1 at 9:35 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Probably won't do all those things, but PDFXchange viewer (free) lets me very easily type onto pdfs or for example make an opaque text box and type into it. I don't know if you could (maybe with the pro version) easily paste images, like the new logo, into a pdf.
posted by melamakarona at 10:30 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you are frequently making the same set of changes to a structured PDF, it may be worth investigating (or hiring a contractor to set up) Acrobat Pro's Action Wizard steps.

For quick manual editing of PDF documents, I have found Wondershare PDFElement to work well on documents that other programs have struggled with, including Acrobat and Microsoft Word.

SmallPDF has a fantastic set of tools that I frequently find myself using when I want to break apart an existing PDF document into either JPGs of each page or extracting images to re-use in another document. I've only had a short interaction with their in-browser PDF editor, but my memory is that at that time it had unpleasant interaction latency (it took a moment to respond to actions) and didn't handle content reflow gracefully.
posted by QuixoticGambit at 10:40 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you have control over the source pdf: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/send-pdf-forms.html
posted by oceano at 10:55 AM on February 21, 2022

Seconding that the way to handle this with the least amount of fussing is to have a non-PDF source file (e.g. Word document or whatever) that you can edit easily and use that to output a fresh PDF file. PDFs aren't really made to be easily editable.

If that's not possible (e.g., because the PDF you receive can't be generated by you, and the people generating the file can't send an editable format like a Word doc) then I'd nth the recommendation to get a copy of Adobe Acrobat (the full-fat version, not Reader) which should allow you to make the edits you need all in the one program. There is a trial version, so you can test it out on your workflow to make sure it does the job you need it to do. The latest version is a $13/month subscription, but you could probably get an older non-subscription version to do the job just as well. If speed is of the essence, it should be an easy case for management to pony up for a license.
posted by Aleyn at 12:35 PM on February 21, 2022

Acrobat will be the best alternative if you must approach this electronically. But if speed is the only consideration and you'll never have to do this again, then print paper labels with the new header and contact information, print every PDF onto paper, stick the labels in the proper places, and scan each altered paper document to a new PDF file. Twice as fast as Acrobat, and faster still than any other file-editing approach.
posted by Scarf Joint at 1:12 PM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

A vote for Bluebeam, your workflow could stay entirely in PDF. Rock solid software, a bit of overkill for your use case. The eXtreme version has some scripting capability, but additional research is needed to confirm your use case.
posted by Muted Flugelhorn at 2:00 PM on February 21, 2022

Assuming your source PDF is text-based (not a scanned image), your current process takes something that might be accessible and turns it into something completely inaccessible. The full version of Acrobat, or many of the above suggestions, should allow you to keep it text-based. You could even use a mail merge in Word to enter the contact info and generate all the PDFs at once.
posted by expialidocious at 3:32 PM on February 21, 2022

If you’re on a Mac (you don’t say what you’re using) then you can add shapes, text, images etc to PDFs, then save the PDF, using the built-in Preview application.
posted by fabius at 5:48 AM on February 22, 2022

I was clearing out a bunch of old tabs when I stumbled onto a blog post about using python to replace images in a PDF and figured I'd share it.

https://arunmozhi.in/2019/01/29/replacing-image-in-a-pdf-with-python/
posted by phil at 1:07 PM on March 20, 2022