(Click the image to enlarge.)ĭepending upon the type of object you are editing, different tools will appear. With your PDF document open, you can click on any piece of the document to see that every piece has become a live object ( Figure A).įigure A Once you see the box around the object, it is in editing mode. Let’s edit text in a PDF document to illustrate this point. Remember, you are editing this document as if it were an image, so typical image editing tools will apply however, with LibreOffice Draw you are dealing with a sort of drawing app/word processor hybrid. Navigate to the PDF file in question and open. In a very smart move, LibreOffice developers made it so PDF documents don’t have to be imported all you have to do is fire up the LibreOffice suite and go to File | Open. For this tutorial, I will assume you already have the latest LibreOffice release installed. Let’s open up a PDF document, make some changes, and export it back into PDF format. The only challenge you might face in the PDF editing process is that it can take a while to get up to speed in LibreOffice Draw. This feature works the same on all platforms, which means you can edit PDF documents on Windows, Mac, and Linux in the same way.

When you’re finished, the document simply needs to be exported back into PDF format. In Draw, your PDF documents temporarily become images that can be edited. Don’t expect to create interactive forms and the like in LibreOffice, but you can take a basic PDF document and make simple edits, thanks to LibreOffice’s built-in Draw feature.

The good news is the flagship open source office suite LibreOffice can open and edit PDF documents. Many small businesses cannot afford to purchase the full-blown Adobe Acrobat application, and although the open source Scribus does a great job of creating PDF documents, it cannot open a PDF file for editing. With LibreOffice Draw, you can edit basic PDFs without splurging for Adobe Acrobat or jumping through any hoops with add-ons.Ī PDF is one of the most viable solutions for companies that need to send mission-critical documents this is especially true when documents must be viewed in the same formatting and layout in which they were created.

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