search & repace all: Acrobat Pro DC or Adobe Illustrator?

[benoît21949011]

I have a heavy pdf which I need to revise, and I massively need the tool "Search and replace all" with or without the option to revise the changes 1 by 1 (depends on grammar) in a quick and optimised workflow.

Which editor is the best for that, Acrobat Pro DC or Adobe illustrator? The pdf has a lot of text boxes and a peculiar formatting.

[try67 · Accepted solution]

Acrobat doesn't have a Search and Replace All command, and I doubt Illustrator will too.

PDF files were simply not meant to be edited in such an extended way. You should go back to the original file used to create the PDF and edit it, or if you don't have access to that file export the PDF to another format and then edit it.

[benoît21949011]

I found this

Find and Replace Text in Adobe Illustrator CS6 - VisiHow

Is this current?

[try67]

You'll need to ask over at the Illustrator forums. Plus, I'm not sure how well it's going to work with a PDF file, as opposed to an AI file.

[benoît21949011]

I installed the trial version of Adobe Illustrator, and it only allows to open pages from a pdf 1 by 1. But it's a 700 pages document

Does Acrobat Pro DC at least have while editing a pdf a search & replace function with manual check and click next, like any word processor does?

[MichaelKazlow]

As mentioned earlier. PDF files are not meant to be extensively edited. PDF files are not Word Processing documents. Think of it as digital stone. If a stone has been text engraved in it you can fill it in and make changes, but it won't look the same as creating the stone over from scratch. You certainly don't want to change hundreds of stone tablets. If the original files are not available to recreate the pdf, you might try to save the PDF files to Word format and see if you can recreate the PDF. When you edit a PDF file, it is possible to change just one letter and have the entire page fall apart.

[try67]

Yes, Acrobat has a one-by-one Search & Replace capability.

[jaym85408297]

Find and replace text in Illustrator works just fine. You can find, replace, replace and find next, or replace all.

Also, you can find and replace fonts, which Acrobat doesn't seem to do.

[Dov Isaacs]

On behalf of Adobe, I will repeat yet again the warning I have provided in the past and then lock this thread!

Adobe Illustrator is not, repeat not, repeat yet again is not a general purpose PDF file editor. Adobe Illustrator only fully supports editing PDF files that were created with Adobe Illustrator as PDF using the option to maintain editability (in that case, Illustrator actually puts private data in the PDF file that enables safe editing). The fact is that Adobe Illustrator does not support the full PDF imaging model. Editing a general PDF file may result in (1) changing of colors (Illustrator only can deal with either CMYK or RGB with grayscale – it does not support mixtures of CMYK and RGB color spaces), (2) outlining and/or loss of text, (3) corruption of complex graphic objects, etc.

          - Dov