I don't want to create PDF files (last week), but I would like to edit ones I have downloaded. These often have unnecessary images, over-large fonts etc. I would like to be able to reduce them to their essentials and make them economically printable. What would you suggest? John Gilder
I'd suggest not bothering: it takes far more time and effort than it's worth. You can still save paper by printing only the useful pages from multi-page documents. Also, many PDFs still work well enough if they are printed half-size, so that two fit on each A4 page. (Pdf995 will do this.) Foxit, which provides a free program you can substitute for Adobe Reader, also sells a Foxit PDF Editor for $99 (£50). A few hours with the evaluation version will give you a reasonable idea of the problems. There is also a free software (GPL) project developing Pdftk, the PDF Toolkit.
Backchat: As Colin Sopp and others pointed out, John would do better to copy and paste parts of each PDF into Word as unformatted text. Colin adds: "If he has Office 2003, he can print into Microsoft Office Document Imaging (Office Tools) and use the character recognition therein to open into a Word document." Jeremy Ashcroft suggests using GreenPrint's free printer driver from printgreener.com/productworld.html
Comment: With hindsight, I should obviously have suggested copy-and-paste, but in my experience it rarely worked. So I tried it again this week, and it worked nine times out of 10....
