Adding to a PDF with Photoshop?

MC
Posted By
mike costantini
Feb 14, 2007
Views
351
Replies
7
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Closed
Hi, I need to open a PDF file of an 8.5"x11" page of sheet music and add measure numbers to the sheet. I am a beginner with Photoshop. When I try to open the PDF file, it asks me things and I don’t know what to select, such as bounding box, art, media, trim, etc.. When I pick one of those and open the file, it looks very odd, there’s no white background. I figured out I could add a layer and paint bucket fill it white and place it behind the music and now it looks normal. I then tried to add a "1" and save the PDF. It appeared to work, but all my margins were gone..

Is there any way I can accomplish this? I also have the full version of Acrobat at my disposal but I couldn’t figure out how to do it with that either….
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BL
Bob Levine
Feb 14, 2007
DO NOT use Photoshop for this.

Do you have InDesign?

Bob
BL
Bob Levine
Feb 14, 2007
Sorry, hit send too soon.

How was the PDF created? Where’s the original document? If it’s avaialable that’s the way to do this. If not, you can place the document in InDesign and add the text there and export a new PDF.

You might want to wander over to the Acrobat forum. You can certainly add text to a PDF using Acrobat.

Bob
AC
Art Campbell
Feb 14, 2007
Mike,

* If you want to do it in Photoshop, use Acrobat to export the file as a graphic and bring that in. Then add a text layer and position your numbers.

* You can do the same thing with Word, if you wanted to, bringing the graphic as a background and typing the numbers on top of it.

* In Acrobat, you should be able to add text numbers using the Typewriter Tool or by adding form fields.

Of these methods, I think the Typewriter Tool would be the easiest, so long as you don’t mind Courier.

Art
MC
mike costantini
Feb 14, 2007
I don’t have InDesign as I never really do that kind of work. As far as the original program that created the PDF, it’s a music notation program, and not a very good one either. I just print it to a PDF from that program. I never saw any tool in Acrobat called "Typewriter Tool"
Where is that found? The only thing I see is a text touchup tool and that won’t really work for what I need…

If I save the PDF as a graphic, what kind, jpg?

Also, if I do it that way, will I be able to convert it back to PDF? It needs to be a PDF file for people to download and print.
BL
Bob Levine
Feb 15, 2007
Again, don’t do that! You’ll rasterize the file and not only will the quality suffer, the file size will explode.

You say have Acrobat…what version?

Bob
MC
mike costantini
Feb 15, 2007
I have version 7 of Acrobat Pro
AC
Art Campbell
Feb 15, 2007
I’m running Acrobat 8, but I sort of half remember it from 7…

If you save out as a graphic from Acrobat, the format probably doesn’t matter a lot. And because you’re talking sheet music, I expect you can knock the colors down to 2. Then add the text and print out through the .PDF virtual printer — saving as a .pdf will blow the file size up.

Art

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