To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It’s like trying to “edit” the ingredients of a cake after it’s finished. You don’t edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
It’s also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn’t have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It’s a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it’s possible to edit PDFs but of cause it’s a pain in the ass because that format doesn’t have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn’t understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It’s a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it’s a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it’s more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
To be fair PDFs are not meant to be edited (especially not by Word). PDFs are the product not the source. It’s like trying to “edit” the ingredients of a cake after it’s finished. You don’t edit the cake, you edit the recipe and make a new cake.
Well yeah, because it’s not feasible to deconstruct a baked cake, not because “things that are made shouldn’t be edited”.
It’s also not feasible to deconstruct a PDF. It doesn’t have a concept of paragraphs and lines. Almost all semantic relations and information is lost while saving a PDF.
I edit PDFs all the time for work. It’s a pain in the ass, but perfectly doable. Trying to prevent people from editing files by making it annoying is not in any way a sane strategy.
As said it’s possible to edit PDFs but of cause it’s a pain in the ass because that format doesn’t have a lot of semantics information about the original source. PDF doesn’t understand how to reflow text to the next line.
It’s a bit like having a Photoshop file with many layers, saving the image as PNG, sending that PNG to someone else, they open it in Photoshop and than complain about why Photoshop is trying to prevent the PNG from being edited.
You can edit the PNG but it’s a pain in the ass because the original layer information is lost. Same with PDF. Nobody ever tried to prevent anyone from trying to edit PDFs but of it’s more that fixing some minor typo is certainly is a pain in the ass because thats not what this format was designed to do.
And yet… libreoffice does it pretty ok