I do not work in IT.

I have been working on a custom enhancement of one of our standard products. The manuals for our products are created in the US.
I only have PDF versions.
I want to edit the manuals to reflect the changes I have made.
Some to test within the manual but also changing some of the drawings, exploded views and components therein.

I am currently using ‘Inkscape’ share ware but losing patience with it. I don’t seem to be able to change the line colour even. Trying to draw a circle for a part call out has just wasted me a half hour because it wants to draw it with a white outline and black fill and I cannot seem to change it. Anyway, rambling now.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a nice stable bit of software that can allow me to edit PDF’s please?

Again this is for manuals rather than anything arty.

Adobe Acrobat Professional?

convert to word?

convert to word using Adobe Acrobat Professional

Edit: if you email it to me I’ll convert it for you, as long as it’s only one or two documents and not huge file size.

In Inkscape Ctrl+Shift+F should give you the Fill Properties dialog/pane, which lets you set the fill and line (in different tabs) properties, including colour.

Jeez, I am a grown up, I design lovely big pumps and parts thereof and have an intimate knowledge of Solidworks.
Why do I always feel like a dense child when it comes to this type of thing.

Thanks for the offer Gary but I need to be self sufficient in this as we are getting more and more adventurous with our kit and this will be a requirement more and more.

I do like the idea of getting grown up software such as AAP. I notice there is a free download trail. I shall investigate.

Has any of you guys used Inkscape? Is it me? I see it has good reviews but man, I am struggling to get anything done other than the most basic of text changes.

Ooh, thenorthwind. Thank you. I shall have a look while AAP downloads. Ta.

Yup, found it. Thanks tnw!

Nuance PDF Converter Pro is much cheaper than Acrobat Pro and will do most things its more expensive competitor does.

@ Rachel,

Can you share a link to the correct software please? My search results are showing ‘Adobe Acrobat DC’. Is that the same thing as you are referring to?

Nitro Pro for the wallet savvy.

Enfocus Pitstop Pro is the daddy when it comes to PDF editing and there’s not much it can’t do. It’s not cheap but they do a free trial or you can rent it on a monthly basis. Or, as mentioned, the last few versions of Acrobat Pro are much improved for basic editing.

Pitstop
Acrobat Pro

p.s. The DC is the cloud based legit version. You should be able to get an ‘older’ version if you have some torrent software…

some other options for more light weight editing

1) word 2013 and later will open and convert PDF’s natively.
2) http://www.pdf2word.com will take your pdf and email and word copy

neither of those will help much with graphic editing – but they are decent options if the document is text heavy.

Inkscape is pretty powerful but it’s a royal pain to do seemingly ‘simple’ operations in it. Once you find the properties box that thenorthwind pointed you towards most of the basic image controls you might want are in there I think.

I use bluebeam. It rocks.

Has any of you guys used Inkscape? Is it me? I see it has good reviews but man, I am struggling to get anything done other than the most basic of text changes.

Oh, that takes me back! I went from doing vector stuff in CorelDraw on a PC to using Illustrator on a Mac; pretty much reduced a grown man to impotent tears of rage and frustration at not being able to get it to do even simple things easily!
And I’m not exaggerating. Having to use a sodding dialogue box to tap in values to space text on a curve, for example, instead of just clicking on the text and just nudging ‘handles’ on each character.
Talk about obtuse.
Makes me angry just thinking about it now! 😀

Serif Page Plus might be worth a look.

drawboard – brilliant

https://online2pdf.com/pdf2rtf