Who knows a lot about PDF editing and creating images to offer some insight?

[Aniej]

I am looking for some insight on how to accomplish a few goals related to PDFs I am working with. Here are a few of the things I am looking to do:

1. The ability to actually make images such as the one attached or to be able to make additions to the attached pdf such as adding further coloration.

2. I would like to be able to highlight words or parts of the pdf as if I were reading out of a textbook. The ability to make annotation would be great; I am aware of the fact that adobe reader allows users to add little text bubbles, but they are pretty annoying. The closest I have come to this is formulate as TJ Riley has suggested, but while it is a app that gets the job done, it is pretty rough.

Free to cheap is always better, but I will pay for what I really want. Any and all suggestions are more than appreciated. I will respond asap if you have follow-up questions.

 

[Aniej]

sorry for the confusion, I normally post on here a lot, but this is the first time I had to attach a pdf and my file was way to big.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Off-hand (and without seeing your attachment), I can't think of any piece of software that will let you manipulate the document's images to the degree you want easily. You can pull PDFs one page at a time or individual images into Illustrator and Photoshop but in either situation, there are limitations as to what you can achieve, particularly if you don't have the fonts.

PDF is not a format for more than the most basic of editing... even Acrobat Pro (v6 at least) doesn't offer much more than the ability to downsample images and even then, it won't handle anything used as an image mask.

As far as annotating goes, you might find the Planet PDF site of some help. http://www.pdfstore.com/category.asp?CtgID=36

Still, there may be something out there that does everything that you want, but it won't be cheap at all. Personally, from a design and production perspective, beyond cropping and reordering pages and image extraction, I would always prefer to use the authoring application to go back to the master files to edit the resulting PDF. When I send a PDF out into the world, the whole idea is that it is 'locked' to some degree.

You might also find reading the Wikipedia summary on PDFs helpful to read to get an overview of what it is you're dealing with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

 

[Aniej]

Off-hand (and without seeing your attachment)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

I might have been attaching it while you were responding. Let me know if that helps at all?

 

[Blue Velvet]

I might have been attaching it while you were responding. Let me know if that helps at all?

I've seen it. It has a very low-resolution image embedded within it and would give me or any of my colleagues the screaming heebie-jeebies if they received a file of that technical quality.

Did you process that through OSX's Quartz Print to PDF feature by any chance?

 

[Aniej]

I've seen it. It has a very low-resolution image embedded within it and would give me or any of my colleagues the screaming heebie-jeebies if they received a file of that technical quality.

Did you process that through OSX's Quartz Print to PDF feature by any chance?

WHAAATTTTT how dare you suggest that. I don't even know where the drop down box on the bottom left corner of the print menu is in order to do such a thing.