Need PDF Editor
 

My copy of Adobe Acrobat Standard is on a machine that is in for service.

I have a PDF of a newspaper article that I would like to "edit" by using the yellow highlight tool on two paragraphs.

Is there any software I could download that would let me do this?

Or, if anyone has another idea, I also have Office 2007.

Try Primo PDF. It's free:

http://www.primopdf.com/

The latest editions of Word Perfect (which can be found on eBay for <$20) will edit pdf files.

I also saw WordPerfect X3 at Fry's for $79 with a $79 rebate!

Thanks for the suggestion. I looked at the URL and it seems that Primo is used for creating PDFs (which I can do with different software) but not editing them. Am I wrong?

The Nitro program on the same URL seems like it's the one. I suppose I could take the 14 day trial since I'll get my other computer back by then (hopefully). What do you think?

You're right about Primo -- I misread your original post. Try the 14 day trial of Nitro. If it's like the Primo product, it's excellent. Alternatively, you can buy the download of Acrobat from Adobe and then return it within 30 days for your money back.

Also try the free version of PDFill.

If you're really brave, you can hand edit - the specification is public and you can open as text in a decent editor (vi comes to mind). I have fixed broken pdf files this way, and made small changes (fonts, page breaks, etc).

The plot thickens.

I e-mailed the file to a friend who has full Acrobat. He opened it but the edit tools (i.e. highlight, which I needed) would not work. He got some kind of error message about not being able to edit the image.

I made this file by using HP Scanning Software version 4.5 which has no setting for specifying the type of PDF other than things like resolution, sharpness, etc.

Well, it sounds like you've scanned the source as an image and saved it to a PDF. You'd be better off scanning it to one of the more common image formats (such as TIFF) and using an image editor like Photoshop (expensive) or The Gimp (free) to overlay highlighting on the selection.

Even better, scan the original using the IRIS OCR software that comes with your HP, and save it to a Word document. Then you can do pretty much whatever you want with the resulting text.

As Porkrind noted, your scanning software created an image PDF. The full version of Acrobat can do OCR (and quite effectively). This permits editing, cutting and pasting and highlighting, among other things. You can't tell the difference between an OCR'd pdf and an image pdf just by looking at it. However, in the full version of Acrobat, you'll be offered the OCR option under Documents if you've an image pdf.