Changing Text, Images, and Adding Backgrounds and Watermarks in Acrobat Documents
The ideal way to make changes to the text and images in an Adobe Acrobat .pdf document is to make the changes in the native application (e.g. Word, PowerPoint) and create a new .pdf after the changes are made. Sometimes, however, you do not have access to the original document and have only the .pdf document to work with. Fortunately, Acrobat has several tools that will enable you to make changes to text and images in the Acrobat document, as well as add backgrounds and watermarks.
Touch Up Text tool
Open your document in Acrobat. Go to the Tools menu, choose Advanced Editing, then TouchUp Text Tool (Figure 1). Next, move your cursor to where you want to edit your text and click. A bounding box will surround that region of text (depending on the application it was created in, the bounding box might surround a single paragraph, or the whole page). Delete the unwanted text, and type in the text you want to add. As the TouchUp Text Tool does not auto-wrap, you will need to add in your own line breaks by hitting Enter.
Figure 1: the Touch Up Text Tool
You can change the properties of the selected text as well. After choosing the TouchUp Text Tool and selecting the text, right-click and choose Properties (Figure 2). From the resulting dialogue box you can change the font, font size, font color, and the size of the spaces between the characters and the words. You can also change the height of the characters using the Horizontal Scaling box, the stroke size (stroke is the outline around the characters) using the Stroke Width box, the Stroke color using the Stroke color picker, and the texts vertical offset from the baseline (the imaginary line underneath the text) using the Baseline Offset box.
Figure 2: Touch Up Text Tool Text Properties Dialogue box
Acrobat is usually able to find the correct font to match the text you are editing. If the font is not installed on your system, you will need to treat the text as a graphic and replace it using the TouchUp Object Tool.
The TouchUp Object Tool
You can manipulate graphics in a .pdf by using the TouchUp Objects Tool, just below the Touch Up Text Tool (Tools menu>Advanced Editing>Touch Up Objects Tool). After selecting the TouchUp Objects Tool, define the object you want to manipulate by clicking and dragging to create a rectangle around the object. You can delete the object by hitting the Delete key, or move it to another part of the document by left-clicking and dragging (your arrow keys will also move the object by small increments).
For more advanced manipulation, you need Adobe Photoshop 6 or later (or Adobe Illustrator if it is a vector-based image). Right-click the graphic after selecting it and choose Edit Image. This will take the graphic from Acrobat to Adobe Photoshop. From there, edit the graphic (to replace the graphic entirely, add a white layer over the existing graphic, and place the new graphic over the white layer). Be careful not to change the overall dimensions, as this will change the alignment of the graphic in the .pdf. After editing the image, flatten all the layers together by going to the Layers menu and choosing Flatten Image. When you are finished, go to the File menu and choose Save. The graphic will be automatically updated in the .pdf.
If you have to do any major manipulation of graphics in the document, a simpler solution might be to open the .pdf in Photoshop (File>Open), make your changes using the instructions above, then save it as a .pdf by going to the File menu, choosing Save As, and changing the File Format to Photoshop PDF.
Adding Backgrounds and Watermarks
You can easily add a background or watermark to a .pdf in Acrobat by opening the document in Acrobat, going to the Document menu, and choosing Add Watermark & Background (Figure 3). This will bring up the Watermark & Background dialogue box (Figure 4).
Figure 3: The Add Watermark & Background command
Figure 4: the Add Watermark & Background dialogue box
From here you can add a background or a watermark made from text, or a graphic. For a text watermark/background, go to the Source section, choose From text, type your text, and choose your font, size and alignment. For a graphic watermark/background, choose From File in the Source section, and browse to the graphic (it will not support .gifs, but will support .jpgs, .pdfs, .bmps, and most other graphic formats).
After creating the watermark/background, use the Position and Appearance section to position, scale, rotate, and set opacity for your watermark/background. You will likely want to set opacity fairly low, so as not to overwhelm the content of your document. A preview will appear in the upper right.
Finally, use the Page Range to apply the watermark/background to all pages, or just a range.
As always, if you have any questions (particularly about bringing a graphic from Acrobat to Photoshop and back, which can be a bit tricky), phone me at 719-543-2262, or email me at Jeffrey.Wood@Colostate.edu.
