Using the TouchUp Text tool to edit text

You use the TouchUp Text tool much like the mouse cursor in a word processing program. You can either select the text containing the characters you want to edit or simply insert the cursor into the text and edit text on either side of the cursor. Thanks to Acrobat 6 support of document structure tags, you can now make much larger text selections than previously possible. The Acrobat 6 TouchUp Text tool lets you make text selections based on a heading or paragraph style tag present in the original document you converted to PDF — hopefully, a document created in an RTF (Rich Text Format) word processing program like Microsoft Word that adds these structure tags automatically. The end result is that clicking on text in a PDF document with the TouchUp Text tool displays a bounding box (also referred to as a container) around the text, based on its underlying document structure.

You can then select any or all text within the bounding box. For example, if the text you click has tags that define it as Normal paragraph style, a bounding box appears around the whole paragraph, indicating that you can select any part or the entire paragraph for editing. This is great progress for a program that until recently only allowed you to select one line of text at a time for editing. When you select the TouchUp Text tool on the Advanced Editing toolbar, the mouse pointer changes to an I-beam. Click the I-beam on a line or block of text where you need to make your first edit. When you click, Acrobat encloses the text in a bounding box defined by the underlying document structure tag. You can select any or all the text within the bounding box by dragging the I-beam through the desired text. To make editing changes to the surrounding characters when you insert the I-beam into text, use one of the following techniques:

• To insert new characters at the insertion point, just type the characters.
• To delete characters to the immediate right of the insertion point, press the Delete key.
• To delete characters to the immediate left of the insertion point, press the Backspace key.
• To restore characters deleted in error or remove ones incorrectly inserted, press Ctrl+Z (Ô+Z on the Mac), your good ol’ trusty Undo key.

Note that Acrobat 6 now supports multiple levels of undo. To make editing changes to text you’ve selected by dragging the I-beam cursor, use one of the following techniques:

• To replace the text you’ve selected with new text, just begin typing.
• To delete selected text, press the Delete key or right-click the text selection and choose Delete on the context menu.