The PDF format is now one of the most common ways in which businesses distribute pertinent information regarding various aspects of their operation. This could be in the form of white papers, case studies, tutorials, financial and other reports, operation manuals, and so on. The problem with PDF is that it requires a PDF editor in order to make any changes to the information inside, whether that’s text, images, links, media, or any combination of those content types.
In fact, there are far more tools available to read or view a PDF file than there are to edit one; for example, even browsers like Google Chrome can act as PDF readers. The challenge is to find a way to edit PDF so the information can be altered while staying true to the layout, fonts, and other attributes.
Using a PDF editor (such as the professional Adobe Acrobat or popular PDFelement) is certainly the best method, especially with PDFs containing complex layouts, but there are also some workaround methods to achieve this. Read on to learn more about how to edit PDFs, including editing a scanned PDF document.
Method 1: Use Google Docs
Google Docs is a versatile product from the G Suite family of cloud-based document management tools. Not only does it offer several add-ons to help you edit PDFs but it can also convert a PDF into its native Docs format and allow you to edit the file. Of course, you’ll need to convert the file back to PDF when you download it, but Docs has you covered there as well.
Here’s what you need to do in order to edit a PDF document using Google Docs:
1) Log in to your Google account on a PC or Mac and open the Google Drive app.



Method 2: Use MS Word
Microsoft Word also has a PDF conversion utility built into it, which is why you can save a Word document as a PDF file. For our process, we’ll do the reverse, which means converting a PDF to .doc or .docx and opening it for editing inside the Word application. Here are the steps:
1) Launch MS Word and click on File → Open.

Method 3: Use an Online PDF Editor
There are tons of free PDF editors online where you don’t need to download anything or even pay a fee. Most will force a watermark on your output file, which might not be useful to you; however, there are a few like PDF Pro that will let you make edits on top of the existing content and download the resulting file as a PDF without adding a watermark.
The only problem with this process is that you only have 3 credits before you get locked out of the editing feature. Still, it’s a reasonably good way to do a one-off edit every now and then. Here’s how to edit PDFs on the PDF Pro website:
1) Go to the PDF Pro website at this URL. 2) You can now either click the green button to upload your file or simply drag and drop it into the web page.

With all of these methods, you’ll notice one problem or another. In the case of Docs and Word, you might see alignment and layout differences; with online tools, unless they’re premium utilities, you generally won’t be able to edit existing content, merely overlay new content after masking it with the eraser tool. In all these cases, the resulting output might not be useable or shareable. So, what’s to be done?
The proper solution would be to use a PDF editor that can quickly deal with the issue by letting you edit the content directly and saving the file. To that end, we’ve highlighted PDFelement, which offers a Standard and Pro version for Windows and Mac. And the best part is that you can directly edit text and images in PDF files with the iOS or Android app as well, giving you a tremendous amount of flexibility.
Method 4: PDFelement (Standard and Pro)

PDFelement offers a wide range of features for editing, annotations, converting, form management, creation, protecting, signing, sharing, and optimizing PDF files. The edit feature is very simple and intuitive, and you’ll be done in a matter of minutes instead of having to find workarounds that, let’s admit it, don’t really work out! There are two types of editing described here: the first one is a simple edit done using the Standard version; the second is performing OCR on a scanned document and making it editable. So here goes:
Edit Type 1: Edit PDF with PDFelement Standard
1) Install and launch PDFelement Standard for Windows or Mac based on the OS you’re running. 2) Click the Open File option, navigate to your PDF, and open the document. Alternatively, you can click the Edit PDF module in the main software window to achieve the same result.

Edit Type 2: Perform OCR on Scanned PDF and Edit It with PDFelement Pro
1) The only difference here is a matter of one extra click and the fact that this action requires the free plugin that comes with PDFelement Pro. When a document that’s been scanned is opened with PDFelement Pro, the software will detect that and offer to perform OCR.

Based on your specific requirement, one of these four ways to edit a PDF should serve the purpose. Of course, using PDFelement is the best way to go if you want to save time and get the job done right, but the choices are there for you.
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