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Originally Posted by rlauzon
Which is effectively what I said. The document is "locked up", preventing user modification.
Which brings me back to my original question: how does one modify a document that is intended to be non-modifyable by anyone except the author?
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This is a common misunderstanding.
PDF are editable unless not explicitly saved in an encrypted state.
The idea of PDF was to providing a format that is a digital yet compact* representation of a document - independently* from the fonts and printer drivers that are installed on the viewers machine.
PDFs - unless not explicitly disabled by the author - are perfectly editable in it's specific bounds using the right software.
Eg: You can define a header and a footer in your favorite wordprocessor. If you send the wordprocessors file to me by email, the file might look differenty on mine than on your screen since my system might use different fonts or a different printer driver or a different version of the application.
This is especially true for Microsoft Word.
If you generate a PDF it will contain every* information that is necessary to view exactly* the same.
However, the information that some text is a header/footer has been translated to the information that a specific letter-shape is located exactly at a specific location on the virtual paper.
Since the definition of the PDF format is public* there are quite a lot of applications capable of editing (eg cropping, removing text ...) these files.
(* "in an ideal world
