PDF files are hard to edit because they aren’t meant to be edited! While there are many solutions that enable a user to make changes to a PDF to some degree, they all suffer from weaknesses in one way or another. Let’s dig deeper into why this is the case.

It all started in 2014, when I was trying to extract text from a PDF file. The file contained some interesting research that I was trying to summarize for a colleague. The software I was using didn’t allow me to copy the text from the file properly, and I couldn’t find a decent PDF to Word converter either. After spending a lot of time on Google and trying various paid and unpaid software products, I came to a stunning realization: most PDF software is terrible! As a web developer, I found it incredible that users were still struggling to edit...