Up front:: I apologize for my level of ignorance regarding Acrobat's capabilities; everybody's got to start somewhere, right?
While working on income tax-stuff, I got it into my head to use Acrobat to edit some tax forms. And I'm not talking about just filling in fields! More like [e.g.] downloading a freely-available Form 1040 from irs.gov, opening it up in Acrobat 9 Pro, and editing the heck out of the text, the placement of lines, the field placement, pretty much use the 1040 as a worksheet/jumping-off point for morphing it into whatever....
As you veteran users can imagine, I ran into a metaphorical brick wall--quick. All I was able to do was fill in the fields designed for that purpose; I wasn't able to change/delete/move text, etc.
I suppose my distilled question [horrible pun on an Adobe site] is:
Was I vastly-overestimating Acrobat's power & usefulness as regards being able to grab any .pdf file off the Net and being able to edit it freely?
Thanks for your time & attention to detail.
Terry
"Was I vastly-overestimating Acrobat's power & usefulness as regards being able to grab any .pdf file off the Net and being able to edit it freely?"Answer to that would be an emphatic Yes. PDF is "mostly" a finished file format and "most" PDFs begin life in some other application then are converted to PDF. "Most" people do not create a blank PDF and start from scratch building a form, they design a form in another application ( Word, InDesign, etc) then convert to PDF and if needed add form fields, calculations etc on top of the layout.
( I say "most" because of course there are always exceptions).
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. The portable part is why it was adopted so heavinly and there are now millions or billions of them floating arouns and used as business tools, and what it means is that the look and view of a PDF is the same regarless of platform, browser, etc. The same cannot be said of the applications they began their life in.
What you are trying to do will only cause your headache to get worse, sorry.
Hope this helps,
Dimitri
WindJack Solutions
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com
Dimitri Munkirs
WindJack Solutions
pdfscripting.com