Editing PDFs

Hi, Craig. You're trying to use an antiquated PageMill application to edit PDF files that were likely created with a much newer application, and which may contain features that are unsupported by any OS 9-compatible software. Instead, why not use a modern PDF editing application on one of your modern computers to do the job?

A possible catch is that the antique versions of Acrobat Reader and PageMill that run in OS 9 may not display such files correctly, before or after they are edited. So is it actually important for you to be able to view or work with these files in OS 9, or are you hoping to edit them with PageMill on your OS 9 Mac only because you don't have an OS X-based app to use for the editing? If the latter is true, just Google "Mac PDF editor" to find a variety of inexpensive OS X-based applications that may be able to do the job for you, and will be fully conversant with all recent Acrobat PDF file features.

Ådobe's PageMill is an HTML & web page creator/editor. I can't imagine the it could edit PDF documents.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

PM 6.5, at least the Mac version, came bundled with Acrobat Distiller v. 3.0.2, which enables it (optionally, not as a default) to save documents that were built in PM as Acrobat 3 PDF files. But Acrobat 3 didn't have many of the features of recent Acrobat versions, and its file format lacks the ability to preserve those features. More to the point, PM can't open and edit PDF files at all, not even Acrobat 3 PDF files — it can only save them.

No version of PageMaker could ever edit PDF documents. As with other applications, PDF was only used as an output format.

Other than Acrobat, later versions of Adobe Illustrator can edit PDFs, as can some specialized prepress apps. Illustrator was once made for OS 9 so if you have that you could try opening them. However, it would open only one page at a time, and editing capabilities are limited.

It may be possible to use Acrobat Reader to copy and paste from the PDF into other applications, and some of them might read the data off the clipboard. For example, try pasting into PageMaker and see if you get anything useful. It works with some OS X apps.

Bottom line is that editing PDFs is not common because PDF was not really ever an interchange format, mostly a "no more edits, this is final" format.

Hi, N23. All true, except that there are several small, free or inexpensive applications that run in OS X and can edit PDF files in varying ways — though I doubt that any of them approaches Acrobat's editing powers. That's why I recommended above that Craig try one (or more) of those apps instead of fiddling with his OS 9-based apps. But we haven't heard from him why that wasn't an option, if it wasn't, or whether he looked into it. I guess the "Solved" star above may signify something in that regard, but we don't know what.

Yeah, I would have mentioned PDFPen (never used it myself), I hear it's good but it's OS X only.

No, here is more information. There is also a Pro version that costs twice as much.

There's also this:

http://www.pdfescape.com/

It's free. I've never used it and don't know its capabilities.

Hi Craigwd_2000;

Adding your question to the bottom of a long closed thread is not the best way to get an answer. I would suggest you repost this as a new thread if you really what to have your question seen.

Allan