Yesterday, I spoke about the neccessity to have the ability to create your own pdf’s if you are in the business of information products. The simple pdf printer drivers you can obtain to do this job are fine but they do not allow to edit an existing pdf.

Why do you need to be able to edit a pdf?

If you have ever downloaded a pdf e-book from, say,  Google Books, you may realise the answer to this question. If you don’t know what Google Books is, it is one of the largest libraries of digitized books available online. Whilst this is great, sometimes, the pdf you end up with on your pc leaves a lot to be desired. Firstly, it may be watermarked on every page with ‘digitized by Google’ – in my opinion an act of corporate vandalism and an issue of raging legal debate at the moment , but thats another issue! Obviously you dont want this watermark on your e-book and neither do you want library barcodes and date stamp pages, blank pages or any other erroneous material. This is why you need an editor, because with this, you can rectify all of these problems and more.

If you dont want to pay out for Adobe’s Acrobat software there are some cheaper alternatives which do the job just as well. Some examples are:

Foxit

VeryPDF

Bluebeam

One which I have personally used for a number of years and can personally recommend is Nitro PDF . At $99 its a third of the price of Acrobat and does everything you need. Heres a screenshot of the basic interface:

With this, you can crop pages (useful for removing watermarks where space allows, or unwanted footers), delete pages (you can see thats just what I’m about to do in the screenshot), add pages, select and copy images, rotate pages (I’ve also done that in this example) and a whole lot more stuff like add security to your files and so on. Once you have an editor like this, your presentation of pdf’s becomes much more professional looking as you can adapt and clean up the files to your requirements rather than just downloading them and shoving them on a disc ‘as is’ with little or no thought. It is well worth the investment if you want to work with public domain materials.