Adobe Acrobat 9 How-To : Editing Text and Modifying Attributes

To touch up a word or line of text in an Acrobat document, simply use the TouchUp Text tool in Acrobat. Here’s how:

  1. Right-click (Mac: Control-click) the toolbar well and choose Advanced Editing to open the Advanced Editing toolbar.
  2. Select the TouchUp Text tool from the Advanced Editing toolbar and click the tool within the text you want to edit. The paragraph is surrounded by a bounding box.
  3. Drag the I-beam pointer to select all or part of the paragraph, or position the I-beam within the text you want to edit
  1. Type the replacement text or add new text at the position of the I-beam pointer. Click outside the highlighted area to deselect the text.

You can modify properties of new text as well as text already in the document, including the following:

  • Font and font size
  • Fill and stroke options
  • Font embedding and subsetting
  • Spacing between words and characters
  • Baseline adjustments

Follow these steps:

  1. With the TouchUp Text tool, first click the row of text or select the words or characters you want to edit.
  2. Right-click (Mac: Control-click) the text to open the shortcut menu. Choose Properties. The TouchUp Properties dialog box opens
  1. Choose a font from the Font drop-down list. Adjust other text attributes as desired and as the font’s attributes allow. As you make adjustments, the changes are previewed automatically in the selected text.
  2. Click Close to apply the settings.

NOTE

Sometimes the touch-up results aren’t what you expect—often related to fonts used in the source program. For example, many documents seem to use bold or italic text, but it’s just a bold or italic text appearance. In such cases, unless you’re using a named font such as Arial Bold or Arial Italic, when you try to touch up text in Acrobat you won’t have an exact match for the replacement font, since Acrobat doesn’t simulate a bold or italic appearance.

Tips for Tranquil Text Tweaking

Keep these notes in mind when touching up text:

  • If you need to select an entire paragraph, use the shortcut key combination Ctrl-A (Mac: Command-A).
  • To add new text, with the TouchUp Text tool active, Ctrl-click (Mac: Option-click) within the document where you want to add the text. The New Text Font dialog box opens with the default options set (Arial text and horizontal writing mode). Select the font and writing mode you want, and click OK. The default text “New Text” appears on the page. Select it, and then type the new text. Click outside the new line of text to finish the process.
  • Only fonts with a vertical writing mode will write vertically. An error message means that you’ve selected a horizontal-only font.
  • If the text isn’t behaving as text, maybe it isn’t actually text. Scanned text that hasn’t been captured behaves like an image.
  • If you add text and it won’t wrap to the next line, choose Edit > Preferences > TouchUp (Mac: Acrobat > Preferences > TouchUp) and select the Enable Text Word Wrapping checkbox.

TIP

In addition to adding text, you can add line breaks. Click the location on the text block where you want it to break, and then right-click (Mac: Control-click) to open the shortcut menu. Click Insert > Line Break. Then press Enter (Mac: Return) to wrap the text to the next line. You can use the same method to insert other items, including soft hyphens, nonbreaking spaces, and em dashes.

Copy That

The better you understand some of the intricacies of text selection, the faster you can get your work done. Here are some suggestions:

  • Choose Edit > Preferences > General (Mac: Acrobat > Preferences > General) and click Make Hand Tool Select Text and Images. This way, when you position the pointer over text in a document, it automatically works as the Select tool.
  • If you’re copying and pasting text and intend to send it to other people, be aware that unless a recipient’s computer has the same font, it can’t be preserved. Acrobat replaces that font with the closest match.
  • When a document is tagged, you can use the Copy with Formatting option. This option is especially useful if the document contains columns.
  • If you can’t copy text, check to see whether the document has security settings. The author may have specified that copying be restricted.