Forum Discussion
Edit PDF in sharepoint online
Dear community, I am trying to edit pdfs stored in a document library on sharepoint with no success. Is this possible at all to do? Regards!
There's a few problems working against PDFs, here.
1) PDFs were never meant to be edited. They're a *print* format.
2) PDF "standard" isn't a standard. Adobe has extended/abused PDF to no end. This lead to a misuse of PDFs; see #1. Think of OpenGL. There's a standard, and then there is vendor abuse of said standard.
3) Because of this, Microsoft cannot implement a fully featured PDF viewer/editor, due to #2.
As far as browser integration goes, this is a problem on the client side. All major browsers, sans IE, have built-in PDF viewers. It is up to the vendors of PDF software to integrate with those built-in viewers. For example, Adobe has a Chrome web extension that allows you to go from the built-in Chrome web view to Adobe Reader/Acrobat.
OneDrive sync or adding the library within Acrobat are the routes I would personally take in a scenario where these cannot be converted to a proper format designed for editing.
Items 1 to 3 are all incorrect. PDF is first of all a Standard that has been around for a very long time, with its origins in Adobe PostScript. PDF is meant to be edited, think of PDF forms and annotation/commenting. It's intended to be used in review workflows.
Microsoft, like other vendors, have created PDF viewers and editors in the past. There are also multiple Microsoft connectors that allow PDF creation and manipulation.
The fact that SharePoint Online doesn't support launching PDFs in their native desktop application, is a major oversight. I see from this thread that this was first reported in 2018. It's now 2020 and it still hasn't been implemented!!
Microsoft, like other vendors, have created PDF viewers and editors in the past. There are also multiple Microsoft connectors that allow PDF creation and manipulation.
The fact that SharePoint Online doesn't support launching PDFs in their native desktop application, is a major oversight. I see from this thread that this was first reported in 2018. It's now 2020 and it still hasn't been implemented!!
- PDFs (and PostScript) was not designed as an editing format -- PostScript itself resided in the printer raster system for many years before the raster system moved to computers, and even then was a print/display format only.
PDF, same story. Annotations didn't arrive until Adobe released PDF 1.2.
John Warnock said as much, that PDF was designed as a distribution and print format, readable on any machine versus being bound to a particular operating system (i.e. Office binary file formats).
Microsoft does implement converters (open PDF as DOCX; save as PDF).
