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Editing the document itself (Edit)

Editing the document itself (Edit)

Text

  • Select and copy any real text on the page; search with ⌘F (Find Next / Find Previous walk through the hits; ↵ and ⇧↵ do the same inside the field).
  • Rewrite printed text: click into it and type. Delete words, insert new ones, add text on an empty page. The arrow keys move the cursor as you would expect — one character, a whole word with ⌥, and ⇧ extends the selection.
  • Change the font of the printed text itself — any font installed on your Mac, not just the handful every PDF reader owns. The Text palette names the font the way you read it (the family and its real style), the family menu and style menu are live, and the font you pick travels inside the file so the page reads the same on every computer. Bold and Italic work where the family really has such a face, and are greyed — with the reason shown on hover — where it does not. A change that would make the letters print over their neighbours is refused with an explanation instead of silently making a mess.
  • Change size and colour of the text — from a selection or just from a cursor placed in a word. Both live in the Text palette; colour also comes from the Swatches palette. The Text palette comes forward on its own when you select text, so the controls are there without a trip to the Window menu.
  • What you cannot change on printed text: the alignment, the line spacing, the case. A finished PDF page has no paragraphs to re-flow — the words sit at fixed positions — so those controls are simply not shown on a PDF rather than moving text around behind your back.

Objects on the page

  • Select and Move Objects — the object tool picks up things the plain arrow cannot: pictures, shaded fills, reused graphics. Drag to move, pull a handle to resize.
  • Arrange — Bring to Front, Bring Forward, Send Backward, Send to Back (also in the right-click menu, together with Duplicate and Delete). Each is only enabled when there really is something to move past.
  • Colour — change a solid colour on an object, in the colour system the document uses (see §8).
  • Place… / Place Image… — put a picture, a PDF page, an SVG or an EPS on the page as a movable, resizable frame.
  • Links — the Add Link tool draws a link rectangle; its properties window lets you choose whether the rectangle is visible, how it highlights when clicked, its thickness, colour and dash, and what it does: go to a page (at a chosen magnification), open a web address, or nothing. Clicking an existing link in the document — a table-of-contents entry, for instance — takes you to its destination, and hovering over one shows a pointing hand and a tooltip naming where it leads — the full web address, or "Go to page N" — so you can check a link before you follow it.
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