It's no surprise Acrobat edits things by considering them as graphical objects. Even text edits can sometimes be curious tasks; it's just not really what Acrobat is best used for doing.

But when ya don't have whatever original file created this PDF, you trudge onward. And I am not interested in saving the page as a Word or other file and opening up that can of worms.

Got a text line with a hyperlink included. I'd created the link to appear with a traditional, underlined blue line. Later I needed to copy/paste that text on to a different page. I do that, the blue underline stays behind because it barely does a half-assed job of copying text links as it is. Acrobat does not recognize the lonely blue line as "a thing," and so it can't be selected for deletion. It's embedded in the page.

No worries, I'll paste in a small pure white image and cover it up. Nope, it won't cover when I bring it to the front either because again, the blue line isn't "a thing" that's recognized as coverable.

I can copy the content onto a fresh page and delete the bad page, tomorrow.

This doesn’t look like a job for LiveText, does it?

So, when you are using the Edit PDF tool and select the text, doesn't clicking the Underline button make the line go away? It works for me, but perhaps my hyperlink was created differently.

Next time you need to rant about it please put a trigger warning instead of Adobe Acrobat. So many BS issues there, especially with right-to-left language fonts, that I could only fix by moving individual outlines in Illustrator.

I don't know what LiveText is, and I might be at low ebb this week for learning new things.

So I opened the file and lo and behold the blue underline can now have a selection box around it, however deleting it doesn't work. It took three delete operations to expunge it, after first choosing to edit the link, choosing (again) to delete the link from within that dialog box, and so on. First time all it "deleted" was the blue color of the underline.

"Ideally" our publication docs should begin life in pagination such as InCopy, but what happens instead is the textual and graphical elements get pieced together in a Xyleme (our CMS) template. And then Xyleme makes the PDF along with its other duties.

Which is hysterical because all of the formatting and other basic things I'm hammering out will be lost as soon as someone else gets my PDF.

Just today one of our developers complained bitterly about Xyleme pushing users to a web interface instead of the desktop app. He characterized the web interface as evil incarnate while the Xyleme team says, "Hey, it should work just fine." Xyleme is like so many others, assuming they'll just save money by no longer having to develop desktop apps.

That instantly got the attention of my boss, who holds the purse strings for their contract with us.

That's very similar to my feeling about editing PDFs. You're never really working with the real thing, but an interpretation of it.

Ive never looked into those super expensive PDF editing programs like some printers have... but using acrobat pro to edit PDFs has always been a kludge.

With text, I find myself in text edit a lot, stripping formatting 20 times a day...

---

Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

OMG.

After a couple successful saves today I performed my final save. Message comes up saying some fonts can't be embedded (I don't actually care.) And it also says some fonts could not be replaced but that they might have been replaced with dots? Periods. Oh no ....

I see the first instance, no big deal. And then I notice huge chunks of text are just offing GONE and replaced with r r r r r or some other gibberish.

Never an option to cancel, just "OK." Mother trucker on a stick!

I hate my life right now. Thank goodness I'm not on deadline for this.

Correction: Not a font issue. It just randomly deleted several characters from words. And this was all content it had no trouble with saving yesterday.

Correction: Document not borked.

After manually re-typing some missing characters and frequently saving, I closed it and re-opened. The rest of the missing text re-appeared.

Quote
deckeda
Correction: Document not borked.

After manually re-typing some missing characters and frequently saving, I closed it and re-opened. The rest of the missing text re-appeared.

This is in InDesign? I wonder whether you have a font manager running and it was just slow to load the plugin. Sometimes ID squawks and screws up font-substitution when it has problems with a plugin. Quitting and reopening ID is the usual fix.

---

No. Unfortunately this is all within Acrobat DC. And today I’ll tackle another, related document. Frequent saving and closing-reopening is the key to success for Acrobat. I’d forgotten that when I began.