How To Edit PDF Files Using Open Office

I just got a PDF file with an annoying striped background. The stripes were bands of gray, which were presumably put there to make it hard to print. For tired old eyes (like mine), it also makes it hard to read the thing. I needed to edit the document but didn’t want to purchase any new software.

Thankfully Open Office has the ability to open and edit PDF documents. You can’t directly “save” a PDF document, but if you can open and edit one, then you can re-export as a PDF document, which works well enough for me. I already have Open Office installed on my computer (version 3.20; what I’m about to show you requires at least version 3 of Open Office), so here’s what I did to edit the document:

• Make sure that the PDF document you want to edit is not open in any other program, like Adobe Reader. This is very important; if it is open in another program, you won’t be able to fully edit the document.
• Go to http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/download/3435 and download the PDF Import extension for Open Office (if you click on the link, it will open in a new window / tab, so you won’t lose your place here).
• Make a note of where you save the extension. Put it in an obvious place because you’ll need to navigate to it in a moment.
• Open a new presentation in Open Office (you can actually install the extension from any Open Office document, but you have to open the PDF document in Presentation), then select “Tools –> Extension Manager…” from the menus.
• Click on the “Add” button at the bottom of the Extension Manager window, then navigate to the extension file you downloaded, select the file, then click on “Open”.
• Accept the license agreement and follow the prompts to install the extension.
• Click on “File –> Open”, navigate to the PDF document you want to edit, select it, and click on “Open”. At this point, you’ll have to wait a bit so that Presentation can process and open the file (NOTE: If the file is password protected, you probably won’t be able to edit the file, at least not without the password. I didn’t test this part).
• Edit your document, then re-export as a PDF.

I’m not going to get into “how” to edit the file; everybody will want to make different edits, and trying to cover something in a blog post that can’t be adequately covered in a book probably isn’t a good idea! I will, however, tell you how I got rid of the annoying background:

• I clicked on the first page of the document, then right-clicked and selected “Edit Style”.
• On the “Transparency” tab, I clicked on the “Transparency” radio button and chose “100%”.

BOOM! Background image gone; I was able to print out the document without the annoying stripes in the background.

Another neat thing you can do with Open Office…

P.S. — Was this helpful? Did it work for you? Do you know a better way? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.