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.
PDF format isn’t overused or abused, it does what its supposed to; a read only document that can have a signature or markup attached. The headache for users of SharePoint and PDFs is that even if they open a PDF from SP in desktop, when they go to save it gets saved in some obscure temporary directory instead of back to SP. Suggestions to download to desktop, open/edit in application, then reupload back to SP are pure typical MS idiocracy at its best.
Chad Woodward if _only_ it was used as a read only format. Nope, instead it is used as a full fledged editable document. Yes, it is abused and misused, unfortunately.
