Working with PDF Documents.

I have addressed the benefits of PDF documents in earlier posts, but thought it might be time to add a few more thoughts.

For years now, the firm has used PDF Xchange Editor, and its predecessor PDF Xchnage Viewer as the preferred program for PDF documents.  Some of you may still opt to use Adobe Reader or some other third party program to do the same thing.   If all you ever want to do with a document is read it, or perhaps print it, then pretty much any program will do.  Even the Chrome browser has the ability to let you read an print a PDF.

Benefits of a PDF Editor:

PDF Xchange Editor, however, lets you do so much more than a simple viewer.  You can:

• mark up a document, 
• make notes on it, 
• attach a virtual sticky note,
• highlight or strike out text, 
• add or remove pages from a document, 
• add or remove images from a page,
• add watermarks, 
• add bates stamping, 
• redact text, 
• add a signature, 
• and a host of other things.

The PDF format is not really meant for editing documents that still need changes to text or layout, but you can make some limited changes even there.

Making a Document Easier to Use

Many people have express frustration when they cannot copy and paste text from a PDF.  Typically, this has to do with the way the document was created.  Many PDF documents, are generated using a "print to PDF" or similar feature that retains the text of the original document as text.  This allows a viewer to copy and paste the text into another document.  It also has the benefit of making the file size of the document much smaller.

Other PDF documents are created in such a way that the text is not captured. Scanning a document is the most common way to create this sort of PDF.  In effect, the computer is taking a picture of the document and embedding that image into a PDF.  So instead of actual text, the page is a picture of the text in the original document.  If you try to highlight the text, it won't work as you are simply putting your cursor over part of an image.

Fortunately, PDF Xchange Editor offers a solution to this.  If you get a document that has imaged text, you can use the OCR feature in Xchange.  OCR stands for ocular character recognition.  The computer looks at the image and recognized the words in it.  It then saves those words as part of the document so that you can use that text however you like.

The OCR feature may take a while to run, depending on the length of the document and the power of your CPU processor.  A document that is thousands of pages long may take hours to OCR, so be aware of that.  Shorter documents, though, likely only take a few minutes.  Once you have run the OCR and saved the document again, the document will retain that information for future use.