Good free PDF editing software

I have a 100+ PDF document that needs completely rewriting.

A lot of the language and text used will be the same but a lot will need to be changed. Pictures et cetera won't need to be kept. Although some New pictures may be inserted instead.

I have tried rewriting PDF documents in the past using Word but the formatting is normally completely broken so it ends up as a separate line each line: as in a carriage return in between each line. I would hate to have to reparse all 100 pages.

Does anyone have any advice on what can be done either to make Word play nicer or recommend a free software that can be used instead. I'll only need to do this once so there's probably need to purchase any software suite.

Have you tried copy-pasting the text into a plain text file or a Google Doc? I find that sometimes works, but I've never tried it for more than a few paragraphs...at 100 pages, something will inevitably break. I assume there's no way to get a copy of the original document...

Well, from what I've seen, the carriage returns are inserted by the conversion to PDF. That's why copy-and-pasting yields those annoying line breaks in the first place. In essence, no way around it. Sorry, Rand.

Maybe yuor best bet is to mail the author asking for the original document?

Although I've legitimately got the PDF, there's absolutely not a chance of getting the original document.

For one thing the company that wrote it originally is now bankrupt.

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Originally Posted by RandBlade

Although I've legitimately got the PDF, there's absolutely not a chance of getting the original document.

For one thing the company that wrote it originally is now bankrupt.

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Well, then I wouldn't know, sorry! Good luck with it.

Though if it has only one author, if you're desperate you could mail him and ask if he has a backup. Otherwise, reparsing it is, I'm afraid.

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Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro

Well, from what I've seen, the carriage returns are inserted by the conversion to PDF. That's why copy-and-pasting yields those annoying line breaks in the first place. In essence, no way around it. Sorry, Rand.

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Find and replace carriage returns with, I dunno, space? You can fix the formatting faster than going through billions of lines.

Convert to epub and then open as html?

Give up in disgusted frustration and go to the pub?

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Originally Posted by Aimless

Convert to epub and then open as html?

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Doesn't get rid of CR. Nessus' solution might work best, though you'll probably lose all paragraphs.

Some of these words seem foreign to me, but have you tried using an OCR program as a middle man between the original pdf and word?

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Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro

Doesn't get rid of CR. Nessus' solution might work best, though you'll probably lose all paragraphs.

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You could find and replace two carriage returns with one carriage return, in the same way as you could replace AA with A. I have not tested this yet though.

Word considers it a "Special" character and its a paragraph mark. Doesn't work 100% as expected.

Downloaded a free 30-day (but only needed to use it once) trial version of Foxit's PDF editor. Used that to export it to Word, worked properly it seems no carriage returns.

A ton of Page Breaks though so had to search and replace those (they're a special character too). Found a macro to remove all headers and footers too. The borders were also weirdly messed up so had to thin them out.

Altogether this has halved the document now to 49 pages from double that [though I may want to re-add some page breaks between chapters later] but it seems the text has survived properly by and large (there's a few corrupted subject titles from when I've skim-read it mainly).

Too many field etc errors it was difficult to identify so I did a simple select all, copy and paste-special as text only to a new document. The weird thing is the page count shot-up (despite losing all bigger text, fonts etc) ... identified it that the PDF->.doc conversion document was set to A5 printer paper. Don't understand that, the PDF is I believe bog-standard A4 though to be fair at over 100 pages I've only ever referenced it and never actually printed a physical copy.

Only ever used A0-A4 before, never handled A5 but I thought the way the numbers worked was the increasing numbers were smaller, so A3 is 2xA4, A2 is 2xA2 etc to A0 being relatively massive posters. Surely A5 should be smaller than A4 therefore, half the size, not bigger. Weird.

Yes, A5 is half the size of A4.

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Originally Posted by RandBlade

Only ever used A0-A4 before, never handled A5 but I thought the way the numbers worked was the increasing numbers were smaller, so A3 is 2xA4, A2 is 2xA2 etc to A0 being relatively massive posters. Surely A5 should be smaller than A4 therefore, half the size, not bigger. Weird.

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A2 is 2 x A3 by the way ;). 2 x A2 is A1 size and 2 x A1 is A0. The scale goes from A10 to A0 (You can get extra length of the A0 but the width always remains 841mm).

... I'm full of random poster paper knowledge :)

Yes I meant that. I obviously didn't think A2 is defined as double itself. ;)

Bit confused as to why a document would be more A4 than A5 pages?

There are some free websites that can convert things to and from PDF format. Often they have restrictions on how many documents you can do. Say 1 job every 30 min or so, and also can take quite some time for larger files.