AbleWord
AbleWord is a very capable word processing application that can read and write most popular document formats including PDF's.
What is AbleWord?
AbleWord is a very capable word processing application that can read and write most popular document formats including PDF's. It is fully featured, supporting image formatting, tables, headers & footers and includes spell checking and print preview functions. Best of all it is totally free even for commercial use.
AbleWord can read and write the following file types: Microsoft Word (doc, docx) Adobe PDF (pdf) Rich Text (rtf) Plain Text (txt) HTML (html, htm)
AbleWord Screenshots
AbleWord Features
AbleWord information
Supported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- PDF Editor
- rich-text-format
- Text Editor
- Word Processor
- Writing tool
The only free software possible to edit PDF as text
This is one of the "easiest" BUT:
there atleast 4 others: tomahawk (limited), TIA PDF Edit (full), Softmaker FreeOffice, and using free PDF to Word + Free PDF Editor (can only make pfd's, not edit solo)
Reply written ago
Very impressed. Easy to install, worked like a charm to edit text and save as PDF. It's just like typing in a word processing document. Nice!
After looking at lots of reviews, 2nd choice would have been PDFedit.cz (also free, open source), but haven't tried it yet.
Commercially, I'd go for Nuance PDF Converter Pro, or Bluebeam. Nuance is easier for average users, but very capable and good after sales support. Bluebeam is a little pricier, but has some CAD tools for those that need them. PDFXchange gets a lot of positive mentions too (haven't tried it but know people who have) - free version puts a watermark; paid version is cheaper than Nuance.)
99% of features most people actually need to use are in any of these. Adobe is pricey and not needed.
To create/print and manipulate pages, PDF Redirect and PDFSAM work great and are free.
Cons: None found so far (first use only).
[Edited by bodwyn, May 10]
Having now re-edited the PDF I saved, AbleWord seems to have confused what areas to allow me to type in - a bit of a shame - it was doing so well. Easy enough to "insert text frame", but a shame it can't carry on seeing the frames that were in the original.