Originally Posted by
obgraham
Anyone know a free pdf editing utility that works well?
There's no such thing as a universal PDF editor, because PDFs contain PostScript, a language spoken by output devices, usually* printers. Depending on the method used to create the PDF, it can contain text or graphics, even just scans of a paper document. There are tools to extract the PostScript, but can you speak PostScript?
There are PDF Annotators out there, such as the VeryPDF Editor (which costs and isn't really an editor), and the open source
PDFtk for Windows and Linux. These can do things like fill in forms or edit the metadata, but true PDF editing isn't going to be easy.
* there have been attempts to use it for screen displays too e,g, Sun's
NeWS.