MSU Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics  Info/Facilities > Computer Room > Editing PDFs

Editing and Combining PDF Files

Adobe Acrobat allows you to do limited editing of PDF files at the page level. You accomplish this primarily through three operations: a) inserting one PDF file into another, b) deleting pages and c) moving pages. An example of a situation where this can be useful is when you have made PDF files of each of the chapters of your thesis and you want to combine them into a single PDF.

Start the process by opening the PDF that you consider to be the "main" document, or the first in a series of sequential documents (such as chapters). After you have made any edits (as described below) it's usually best to save the file under a new name, so that the original file is not altered.

Inserting Another PDF

  1. Scroll through the PDF until you are on the page which you want the additional PDF to follow. This isn't strictly necessary, but usually makes step 4 easier.
  2. Choose Document | Pages | Insert from the menu.
  3. Browse to the PDF that you want to insert and click Select.
  4. The Insert Pages dialog will appear. The default choices will perform the insertion after the current page (which is why you performed step 1). If you want to insert elsewhere, you can make that choice here. Click OK.
  5. Check to make sure that the insertion worked as you expected.

Deleting Pages

  1. Scroll through the PDF until you are on the page which you want to delete. This isn't strictly necessary, but usually makes step 3 easier.
  2. Choose Document | Pages | Delete from the menu.
  3. The Delete Pages dialog will appear. The default choices will delete the current page (which is why you performed step 1). If you want to delete a different page or several consecutive pages, you can make that choice here. Click OK.
  4. Check to make sure that the deletion worked as you expected.

Moving Pages

  1. Click on the Pages tab of the navigation pane.
  2. Select the thumbnail(s) of the page(s) you want to move.
  3. Drag the page thumbnail(s) to the new location. A bar appears to show the new position. Release the mouse button when the bar is in the correct location. The page is inserted at that point in the document, and the pages are renumbered.
  4. Check to make sure that the page was moved as you expected.

Other Page Editing

With the Insert, Delete and Move operations, you should be able to accomplish most editing tasks. There are also commands available on the Document | Pages menu to Replace and Extract pages. Information on these is available in the Acrobat Help system.