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Advanced Edit Mode

Power PDF offers two working modes:

  • Review Mode
  • Advanced Edit Mode
The latter allows freer editing of document content, especially text. It offers a wide range of editing, reviewing and mark-up tools, similar to those found in word processor applications.

Note See Advanced Edit Mode and About the panel bar in Advanced Edit mode.

Documents with security protection against modifications cannot be sent to Advanced Edit Mode. Image-only PDF documents or pages enter the mode as images. To modify their text content, you should make them searchable.


Convert to Editable icon

Select Edit > Convert > Convert to Editable to enter the Advanced Edit Mode.

Select Home > Close > Close Advanced Editor to exit the Advanced Edit Mode.

When you switch from Review Mode to Advanced Edit Mode, the PDF document is analyzed and transformed. A message informs you of likely changes, for instance that tags and layers are removed. It also offers conversion settings.

You are prompted to make a backup copy of the original PDF before entering Advanced Edit mode, since the conversion may occasionally encounter difficulties with text flow, formatting and character spacing. If advanced editing does not produce the desired results, you can close the document without saving it, and return to the previous PDF review state.

Alternatives to Advanced Editing are to use the Typewriter tool, or the Text Box tool on a PDF that you later flatten to force text box content to become part of the PDF. However, these tools allow only minor text changes, whereas Advanced Edit Mode supports more extensive modifications.

Tip When advanced edits are complete, you are prompted to use the Finalize tool in the Home tab to make the changes permanent and remove unnecessary flowing layout metadata from the document. Before the document is made available to others, perform the Finalize process.

When you save, print or send the document from Advanced Edit Mode, or you click on the PDF View tab, the document is returned to its state in PDF View, with changes intact.