Traditionally, people who work with texts believe that PDF is an almost uneditable format. And that’s why people who work with texts regularly use the PDF format exclusively for saving and transferring texts, in order to preserve the necessary formatting of the text and symbols writing.
In fact, the PDF format offers much more possibilities.
Today we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the PDF format, as well as about ways the PDF format can be used by people who constantly work with texts (like me).
There are not many disadvantages, so let’s talk about them first.
1. The text can be edited only in specialized programs, which are mostly paid (and here, I will emphasize that a quality product will always be paid because it does not appear from nowhere, but it’s the result of the work of highly qualified specialists. In addition, free applications allow you to work with PDF format — we will discuss them below).
2. If you need to add fonts that are not included in the standard list, you need to sew them.
3. For normal reproduction during printing, it is necessary to use sufficiently large raster images.
And now about the advantages. In addition to the fact that PDF provides the possibility of two-dimensional saving of text and images, which ensures their inviolability when transferred from one device to another, PDF also provides the possibility of editing files. We have already talked partly about this in previous publications (What is the difference between Text Annotation and TextBox Annotation, as well as Ways of annotating texts in PDF format). A tool for viewing this format is usually included in the standard settings of a computer or smartphone. If there is no such application, it can be downloaded and installed easily and for free.
The PDF format allows to use a variety of fonts, as well as add vector and bitmap images, shapes, and multimedia inserts. In addition, being very convenient for people who constantly work with texts, PDF has its technical formats which are used in printing — PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3.
Among the advantages of this format is another one, which protects the text from banal copy-pasting and unscrupulous users — the ability to close the text from editing, copying, various marks, and prohibiting text printing, etc. Regardless of the program through which the PDF file will be opened, it will always have the same appearance.
A file in PDF format takes up little space on the hard disk, as it supports various compression options. This is quite valuable since memory is a resource that, for some reason, runs out especially quickly on devices. And for people who work with texts and images, this is always a significant problem.
If we talk about free applications, there are quite a few of them at the moment. You can simply type “edit PDF” into the search engine, and dozens of links to sites with free applications will immediately appear. Usually, I skip the links with the “advertising” die because, as a rule, we are talking about a minimal set of free applications with an offer to expand the functionality through the registration of a subscription or the purchase of a product.
All these applications allow you to edit text online. Here, each user chooses for himself according to his exact needs. It depends on which functionality is needed and how many files the application must process simultaneously.
It is worth trying PDF once to feel its advantages in working with texts and images.
