Replacing PDF Pages With Adobe Acrobat

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In publishing as in life, little things can sometimes make a big difference. For example, when you’re racing to meet a deadline to release a big PDF publication. Things are looking good, you’ve created your PDF and added lots of extra features and polish in Adobe Acrobat. You’re just about deliver the PDF and heave a sigh of relief when the phone rings or an email appears in your inbox. It’s someone alerting you to a small but absolutely critical change that must be made before the publication goes out. It could be a wrong price in an ad, it could be a wrong image, it could be that the CEO’s name got misspelled, or any of a thousand other tiny things. To publish with the error would be deadly, but so would be missing the deadline. There’s no time to re-do all your work in Acrobat. What to do?

Happily, Acrobat offers the perfect feature to save your bacon in this instance, and it’s called Replace Pages. With it, you can slide in new static content into your PDF, without disrupting any of the interactive features like navigation buttons, hyperlinks, bookmarks, comments, etc. Here’s how it works.

Replacing PDF Pages via Tools

1. Use Adobe Acrobat to open the PDF with the pages you want to replace.

2. Choose View > Tools > Pages. Click Replace.

3. In the dialog box, choose the document with the replacement page(s), and click Select.

4. Replace Pages dialog box, enter the page(s) to be replaced in the original document, as well as their replacements in the second document and click OK.

Acrobat will give you the chance to confirm the replacement. Click Yes and the replacement is made, and all your other Acrobat work in the PDF is preserved (along with your sanity and ability to make a living).

Replacing PDF Pages via Thumbnails

You can also replace pages using page thumbnails in Acrobat.

1. Open both PDFs.

2. Open the Page Thumbnails panel in both document windows.

3. Select the thumbnails of the page(s) you want to use as replacements.

4. Drag the selected page thumbnail(s) onto the Pages panel of the target document. Press and hold Command+Option/Ctrl+Alt, and release over the thumbnail you want to replace. If you’re replacing multiple pages at once, release over the thumbnail of the first page in the range.

As with the other technique, Acrobat will give you the chance to confirm the replacement.

One last tip: If maintaining the smallest possible file size is important to you, after you replace pages in a PDF,  choose File > Save as Other > Reduced Size PDF.

 

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • S Cundiff says:

    If you only need to change a price, you can choose Tools, Content, and then edit objects and text. The pdf will have a bunch of little boxes around everything. Choose the box, (text) you want to change and save the pdf. 

  • Mike Rankin says:

    Very true. For the simplest of changes it may make more sense to edit the text or replace a single image. But one advantage of replacing pages in all cases is that the problem is fixed in the source file, so you know you won’t have to worry about it again.

  • Shep Pavlovic says:

    Actually, I don’t think of Adobe Acrobat as the most convenient tool for such purposes. It’s by no means the very first one as well as has all the features every modern PDF editor requires, but it’s also too overpriced. Nowadays there are dozens of paid solutions having the same features but the price is twice lesser or even more, like this one tool, for example https://990-pf.pdffiller.com/ and so on. There are tons of free ones as well, but frankly all they can do is to change the background and it’s everything they’re capable of

  • Adobe sucks says:

    You did not mention that replaced pages lose all their tags. Re-tagging can be a sh-tload of work, and it’s a big failure on Adobe’s part that you can’t use “add tags” on one page rather than the entire document.

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