Adjusting Text, Images, Objects and Form Fields in PDF Files

Adjusting Text, Images, Objects and Form Fields in PDF Files

September 9, 2008 – 8:05 pm

In addition to the tools for creating, inserting and editing text, images, links, form fields and other objects in PDF files, the latest Nitro Pro (5.4) includes a set of unique alignment, sizing and positioning tools.

If you’ve been designing PDF forms for a while in Nitro Pro or Acrobat, you’re probably already familiar with how they work. But what’s unique about the capabilities in Nitro Pro is that they’ve been extended to work with other objects, including text, images and links. This becomes particularly useful when source files have gone missing and your only option is to make updates to the PDF file directly.

By combining any of the alignment, sizing, centering, distributing and spacing options into an editing process, you can make faster and more accurate updates directly to your PDF content. Below we’ll look at a few examples of how you could use this functionality to fix your PDF files.

The Alignment context tab appears in the ribbon whenever you have objects selected.

Aligning form field objects

Click the screenshot to see how you can select and then align a group of form fields.

The alignment tools helps with the final polishing stage when form designing — you can quickly throw the fields onto your PDF pages and at the very end adjust them to make everything neat.

1. On the Forms ribbon tab, click Edit All Fields.
2. Select all the fields to align. (Hold down Ctrl and click each field one at a time, or click and drag the cursor to select many at once.)
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Align group, click the method of alignment.

Adjusting column and row spacing in tables in PDF files

Click the screenshot to see how the spacing between each row is increased and decreased using the spacing options.

The Spacing controls on the far right of the Alignment tab can be used to expand or contract the spacing between any kinds of objects. The most obvious and common use occurs when designing forms, but the spacing tools also present new correction capabilities when working with text-based tables.

Perhaps, you’ve discovered that the alignment in a column or row is wrong or that the table is not filling the space on the page you would like it to. Perhaps you even need to remove or insert another row or column completely. With all of these, you could use the Distribute and Spacing options in Nitro Pro instead of reverting to the convert PDF to Word functionality. Here’s how you could make adjustments:

1. Delete the offending column/row, or insert a new one. (If necessary, you could copy and paste an existing column/row and then update the text content.)
2. With the Edit tool, select all the text objects you’d like to adjust.
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Distribute group, choose the option to evenly distribute all objects either vertically or horizontally.
5. In the Spacing group, click the appropriate option one or more times to increase or decrease the spacing.

Accurately resizing images and other objects in PDF files

Click the screenshot to see how objects can be resized to match other objects.

You may find that objects such as pictures, links and form fields are not the same size and make your content appear messy. By using the Size options, you can quickly update the height and/or width of objects so they are all the same. The width and/or height change is based on the last object you select before choosing your Size option.

1. Select either the Edit, Edit Links, or Edit All Fields tool.
2. Select all the objects to resize. (Hold down Ctrl and click each field one at a time, or click and drag the cursor to select many at once.)
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Size group, click the method of resizing.

As you can see, there’s no hard-and-fast rules for using these tools. They’re powerful and flexible — it’s a matter of improvising based on the edits and adjustments you need to make to the objects in your PDF files.

By Richard Crocker | Posted in tips | Comments (0)