Editing PDF documents with Master PDF Editor 4
Rewrite
© Lead Image © Ivan Mikhaylov, 123RF.com
The commercial software tool Master PDF Editor 4 lets you edit the most important portable document format of our times.
PDF was originally designed as a print format for forwarding and exchanging documents without allowing changes. It is based on the PostScript programming language, a PDF being a compiled – and thus no longer editable – version of the PostScript code. Editing PDF files therefore contradicts the stated aim of the file format: unchanged forwarding.
In practice, you often have good reasons for editing "finished" print files – whether to add minor corrections, replace individual characters, remove short sections of text, or add annotations. Thus, the desire for editors that are able to load, modify, and again save the immutable PDF documents arose at an early stage.
For a time, Ghostscript was the tool of choice: You converted the PDF to PostScript, then edited the source code in a text editor, and finally converted the document back to PDF. Today, hardly anyone uses that method: The documents are too complex, the PostScript code is anything but intuitive, and the pitfalls are too numerous to avoid during conversion.
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