Today, hardly anyone uses that method: The documents are too complex, the PostScript code is anything but intuitive, and the pitfalls are too numerous to avoid during conversion. Thus, the desire for editors that are able to load, modify, and again save the immutable PDF documents arose at an early stage.įor a time, Ghostscript was the tool of choice: You converted the PDF to PostScript, then edited the source code in a text editor, and finally converted the document back to PDF. In practice, you often have good reasons for editing 'finished' print files – whether to add minor corrections, replace individual characters, remove short sections of text, or add annotations. Editing PDF files therefore contradicts the stated aim of the file format: unchanged forwarding.

It is based on the PostScript programming language, a PDF being a compiled – and thus no longer editable – version of the PostScript code. PDF was originally designed as a print format for forwarding and exchanging documents without allowing changes.

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