Working with objects

Question

This question was posted in response to the following article: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/pro/using/WS58a04a822e3e50102bd615109794195ff-7c74.w.h tml

Answer 1

When you right-click on a page object using the Edit Object tool and open the Properties dialog, some or all of the tabs will be disabled depending on what you've selected and how the PDF file is structured.
For example if the item selected (or its parent) does not have a tag, the Content and Tag sections will be disabled (to create tags in a file without any present you have to run the Create Tags Root command from the Tags sidebar, then tag each item). If you select an image or path the Text section will of course be disabled.
PDF pages often have 'container' path objects which act as a group for a number of other objects - which may be text, images, vector art or a combination of all three. If you select the container you will find most of the properties sections are disabled because the container doesn't have its own properties (it may contain a bunch of text objects but the container does not have a 'font' of its own).
You can see what type of object you've selected on the top of the Content section in the Properties dialog (it will say Path, Image, Text, etc). If you need to select a single object within a structure and cannot click on it directly, you can use the Content sidebar:
If it's not visible, right-click the sidebar on the left of the Acrobat window and choose 'Content'. The icon is a page with a set of horizontal colored lines.
To find where you are in a complex document, use the Edit Object tool to pick something on the page nearby, then from the Content sidebar options menu choose Find Content from Selection.
Activate Highlight Content from the same menu. Now as you click each entry on the tree, the page object will be shown with a blue border.
When you have the item you want to edit selected, right-click as normal.
@UAF: Page objects can only be resized in proportion, which is why there are only handles on the corners of a selected object and not on the sides.
Object editing is an advanced topic so there is some skill involved to understand how the tools work and what consequences you're having (for example editing page objects can mess with the reading order and existing tag structures). It's an area for improvement, let's see what the future brings.