Genius Tips

Howard Oakley solves Mac and iOS issues

Q I need to edit some old documents created using Serif’s PagePlus X9 program for Windows. Are there Mac apps, which will allow me to edit them as PDF files while preserving their fonts? by Br i a n C av e There are several excellent Mac apps A which will edit PDF documents, ranging from PDFPen Pro to the full version of Adobe’s Acrobat CC. However, PDF isn’t a format which is intended to support much in the way of editing, and you may be better off saving your documents in another format such as EPS, if you can.

Acrobat CC and others allow you to make adjustments to pages in a PDF document, corrections, and to export the elements of each page. You could, for example, copy or save the text and graphics and then assemble them in another page layout app, such as Pages. However, Acrobat CC and the like don’t give the same control over the layout and content in the way that PagePlus or Pages do.

If you wanted to work on fully editable documents from PDF files, at present your best option would be to use QuarkXPress; QuarkXPress can analyse the contents of the PDF and convert it into text and other objects within a proper editable page layout.

You’ll also need the same or compatible fonts installed on your Mac, or all the text on every page will have to be reflowed to accommodate the change to a different font.