Escape from PDF: the only sane way to track changes, and then apply them!

Recently, one of my colleagues asked, "Can you guys recommend a good PDF editor that will track changes the way Microsoft Word does? I've got a new project that will require this." Others on the forum replied with suggestions for PDF editing software of various sorts, with varying degrees of sophistication, and there is an impressive array of options out there. But if you are trying to edit anything longer than 500 words inside a PDF document, here is what I had to say:

I strongly encourage you to find a way to convert the PDFs to Word and edit them there, if you're doing detailed copyediting and proofreading. PDF sticker-annotation is great for developmental editing, allowing you to add comments in the margins and point out a handful of obvious errors, but working with PDFs on any more detailed level becomes a soul-killing chore.

Imagine being your client and having to transfer all those detailed corrections into the source document (Word? Pages? An RTF app?) by hand, one by one! The only sustainable happy solution is to pull the PDF content into a word processing document at the very beginning of the editing process, even if it's inconvenient to do so. Even if it means losing all the formatting and editing it as plain text.

The real magic of Track Changes isn't the way it shows all the changes, nor even the way it keeps track of which contributor made which changes and when. The real magic is its ability to APPLY all the changes, even tens of thousands of them at once, with a single click. Or apply those changes page by page, or paragraph by paragraph, or even change by change, each with a single click to Accept or Delete the change(s), depending on how the client prefers to handle the task.

No PDF editor can do that as easily and elegantly as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. If they can even manage that trick at all.

And if you want a copy of PDFElements for Mac to do that transition work, I'm happy to sell you my registration and download code etc. for $25. I paid $75 for it and it doesn't make my life happy the way it promised. But if it will make your life happy, let me know.

[If you are interested, this offer still stands!]

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