How to Edit PDF Files

Editing Text

Before you can start to edit text, you must open the Advanced Editing toolbar. Go to View>Toolbars>Advanced Editing.

It looks like this when it's open:

To edit text, you'll use the TouchUp tool: .

When you click on the TouchUp tool, your mouse pointer becomes a text-editing I-beam when it roams over text. The cursor looks like an uppercase "I."

All you have to do to edit text is click on the text you want to edit, then type in your changes.

You can see our cursor in the snapshot below:

Extracting Text

To extract text from a document, use the TouchUp tool. Click to place the cursor before the text that you want to extract. Hold your mouse button down and highlight the text, as shown below:

Now, right click. You can either cut the text from the document - or copy the text from the document to paste into another document.

Add a Link to a Document

Let's say we want to add a link (a link to a website) to our document. We'd select the Link tool: located in the Advanced Editing toolbar.

Select the Link tool.

Next, draw a rectangle around the text that you want to turn into a link. The Create Link dialogue box will appear.

Select the link type. It can either be a visible rectangle or an invisible rectangle. If the rectangle is visible, select the line style and the line thickness for the rectangle. Then, select the Highlight style and color.

Now, select the Link Action. We're going to choose Open a web page.

Click Next.

Enter the URL for the link.

Click OK.

We now have a link inserted into our document:

To edit a link, double click on it.

You can change the appearance:

Or the actions associated with it:

Interested in learning more? Why not take an online Adobe Acrobat course?

To edit the URL, click the Edit button:

Click OK. Then click OK to close the Link Properties dialogue box.

Insert an Image

Adobe Acrobat 9 doesn't give you a way to insert images into documents like other programs do. However, if you want to insert an image into a document, you can use the Stamps tool on the Comments & Markup toolbar.

To start to insert an image, go to View>Toolbars>Comments & Markup. The Stamp tool looks like this: .

Click the downward arrow beside the tool, and select Create Custom Stamp.

Locate the image file on your computer that you want to use by clicking the Browse button.

Click OK.

Next, select a category for the new stamp. The category you choose will the category it appears in when you click the Stamp tool, then select a stamp.

The categories are dynamic, standard business, and sign here. As you can see, if we click the downward arrow beside the stamp tool, we see those categories.

Choose a category, then enter a name for the stamp (as shown below).

Click OK.

To place the stamp on your document, go back to the Stamp tool. Click the downward arrow, then select the category you placed the image in. Find your image and select it. You may have to click the downward arrow in the menu to scroll down and find your stamp:

Select the stamp. If you move your mouse over the document, the stamp will appear with a hazy film on top. The hazy film appears because the stamp has not yet been placed.

Click in the document where you want to place the image:

Edit an Image

You can also edit an image in a PDF using the TouchUp Object tool: . Using this tool, you can change the position and orientation.

Select the tool, then click on an image or object on the page:

Acrobat draws a light blue border around the object/image to let you know that it's selected.

To change the size of the image/object, click and drag on one of the black squares at the corners of the object/image. We've circled one of the squares below.

Right click on the object to rotate or flip it:

You can also right click to extract the image by selecting Cut or Copy.

To move the object, simply drag it to where you want to place it.

Add Headers and Footers

Headers appear at the top of every page. Footers appear at the bottom.

To add headers and footers, go to Document>Header & Footer>Add.

The dialogue box that appears looks more complicated than it is:

First, choose the font and size that you want for your header and footer text. If you look to the right of the Size dropdown menu, you can underline or specify a text color.

Go to the Margins field and type the margin values for the top, bottom, left, and right margins.

Next, you'll see six text fields (as shown below).

Enter the text you want for the left, center, and right side of the header. These will appear on the far left, center, and far right side of each page.

Next, do the same for the footer.

If you only want a header and footer on certain pages of your document, click Page Range Options.