PDF has become an increasingly large part of our work and life, commonly used in presenting, exchanging and printing documents. It is a static file format that keeps the formatting unchanged independent of application software and operating system you’re running.
But what if you’d like to make edits to a PDF? It can be challenging to make a PDF document editable without external resources. Take it easy! This post is aimed to explain how to make a PDF document editable with different tools, free solutions included.
Cisdem PDFMaster
Free Download macOS 11 or later 
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
The answer is yes. It is not a tricky thing to edit a PDF as long as you have an appropriate tool. Two workable methods are available here to make it come true: using a dedicated PDF editor or converting PDF to editable files (Word, TXT, etc.). The PDF editor must be the most straightforward and efficient way to edit a PDF, while file conversion may result in formatting changes and partial data loss. Therefore, we are going to start with PDF editors.
The market has been presented with multiple PDF editors that makes people feel confused to choose from. So we tested a list of well-reviewed PDF editors and considered Cisdem PDFMaster as the top pick.
Why is Cisdem PDFMaster the first choice?
Combining the advantages of standout features, excellent performance, intuitive user interface and cheap price, Cisdem PDFMaster is put at the forefront.
Free Download macOS 11 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
To make a scanned PDF document editable, you have to utilize the OCR functionality in Cisdem PDFMaster.
If you are a heavy PDF worker, then you must be very familiar with Adobe Acrobat, the leading software for processing PDF files. It’s outstanding both in features and performance, however, a majority of people turn to its alternatives because of its high price. For Adobe users, go through the following tutorial on how to make a PDF document editable in Adobe Acrobat.
Although Microsoft Word is a professional Word document processor, it supports opening a PDF directly by its built-in feature--converting PDF to Word (only version 2013 or later). This method works best with text-based PDF and some details of the document may change after conversion, like page breaks and font size.
Apart from offline solutions, some online services are also capable of making a PDF file editable. Here we select two popular tools to do this job: Google Docs and Smallpdf.
Google Docs is one part of Google office suit that enables to convert an imported PDF to an editable Word document as MS Word does. But the most obvious drawback is that the converted file will lose some images.
Smallpdf is a web-based platform that offers a set of functions to work on PDF files. It includes but is not limited to editing, converting, compressing, merging and protecting a PDF. Since it is completely free, it comes with some limits in editing feature and downloading documents. You can not make edits to the existing text except highlighting text.
Actually, PDF is initially designed for displaying and sharing documents, and it is in the nature of the PDF format not to be editable, unless you use some special tools. What’s more, some PDF files are produced from scanners or made up of images. We called them scanned PDF. It is more difficult to edit and search the text because they are actually collections of images. Apart from the above two reasons, the PDF can be also protected with password to stop unauthorized people from editing.
A fillable PDF is the document that permits users to enter and edit data in specific fields, such as text boxes, check boxes or radio button. To convert a PDF to a fillable PDF, a PDF form creator is necessary. Few PDF editors like Cisdem PDFMaster and Adobe Acrobat can also do this job. They provide a variety of interactive fields to create a fillable PDF form and allow to fill the form out effortlessly.
Bianca is a senior tech editor and strategist at Cisdem with Over 10 years of experience on PDF related solutions which covers all document editing, annotating, converting and managing etc.
