Edit PDF Documents For Free with OpenOffice - Windows [Tutorial]

Open PDF Documents
Edit PDF Documents
Save PDF Documents

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Hello and welcome. PDF or Portable Document
Format is an open standard for document exchange.
It was created by Adobe in 1993 as a way to
create documents that would work the same
on a variety of different operating systems,
such as Windows, Linux, and Mac. Adobe offers
Adobe Reader for free, which allows you to
view the files only. You can pay around $450
for the Pro version which allows you to edit
PDF files, or you can use OpenOffice.org for
free. The default OpenOffice installation
includes the ability to export a PDF, but
does not have the ability to open or edit
them. To enable this ability we need to install
the “PDF Import Extension”. If the PDF
document being worked on is less than 20 pages,
and doesn’t contain any advanced vector
graphics or special fonts, this is the solution
for you. You can edit text, font family, font
size, weight, style, graphiccs and more. It
also works with password protected PDF files.
Let’s open OpenOffice.org. Click the Windows
“Start” button, “All Programs”, “OpenOffice.org
3.3”, and then “OpenOffice.org”. The
“OpenOffice.org” launcher window opens.
Let’s take a look at what happens if we
try to open a PDF without the extension. Click
the “File” menu, then “Open”. Let’s
Select a PDF file, and click “Open”. I
have a test PDF here. We can see that it just
shows gibberish. Let’s fix that by installing
the PDF import extension. Click the “Tools”
menu, then “Extension Manager”. On the
“Extension Manager” window that opens,
click the “Get more extensions online...”
link. It will open a web browser and bring
you to the OpenOffice.org extensions page.
In the “Search” field, enter “PDF”,
and press enter. In the search results the
top result should be the “Oracle PDF Import
Extension”. Click the link for the import
extension. Read more about the import extension
if you wish. Then, scroll down to the download
section. It has links for downloads for various
operating systems such as Windows, Linux,
and Mac. I am using Windows 7, so I will download
the “Windows” version. To the right of
Windows i’ll click the “Win32Intel”
link. Review the download and click the “Get
it!” button. On the “Download Information
Bar”, click the down arrow button to the
right of “Save” and select “Save As”.
On the “Save As” window that opens. We
need to pick a location to save the file.
This can be anywhere you want. When we install
the extension it makes a copy of this file
and places it in the OpenOffice directory.
Click the “Save” button. Navigate back
to the “Extension Manager”. Click the
“Add...” button. On the “Add Extension(s)”
window that opens, select the file we just
saved, and click the “Open” button. It
will ask you who should have access to this
extension. Click the “For all users” button.
On the “Extension Software License Agreement”
window that opens, read the license agreement,
and then click the “Accept” button. We
can now see “PDF Import” listed in the
extensions list. If we no longer wanted to
use this extension we would come back here
and click the “Remove” button. You can
also come here to check for updates to the
installed extensions. Let’s click the “Close”
button to close the “Extension Manager”.
Let’s try to open a PDF again and see what
happens. Click the “File” menu, then “Open”.
Select the PDF document and click the “Open”
button. We briefly see a green bar at the
bottom showing us the import extension is
processing the document. PDF documents are
opened in the Draw program of OpenOffice.
Everything in the PDF now looks correct. Show
editing of objects. When we go to save the
file by clicking the “File” menu, then
the “Save as” link, it wants to save in
the ODF Drawing format. This is fine for editing
and storage, but you probably want to save
this as a PDF. To save as a PDF, click the
“File” menu, then “Export as PDF”.
On the “PDF Options” window that opens,
leave all the defaults and click the “Export”
button. The “Export” window will open.
Browse to the location you want to save the
file, and click the “Save” button. You
can use this same method to convert a Word
Doc to a PDF. Just open the .doc file in “OpenOffice
Text Document”, then click “File”, and
“Export as PDF” as we did before. So we
now can open PDF documents, edit them, and
export them as a PDF again. We can open a
Text document like a Word document, and then
export it as a PDF. This should cover the
PDF editing needs of most users.