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Can no longer edit PDF on Pages

I cannot explain what's happened here. I had my resume as a PDF that I coud also edit on Pages. Now, for whatever reason, I cannot edit the file anymore - it will only open on Preview. Please help. I need to edit my resume - copy/paste is disastrous.

Posted on Jan 29, 2022 4:54 PM

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Posted on Jan 29, 2022 7:25 PM

Pages can neither open a PDF nor edit it. You can drag and drop a single-page PDF onto a Pages document as a document object, but you are restricted to scaling or rotating that object, not revising it. Apple's Preview can open a PDF, but not change the underlying PDF content because it is not a PDF Editor. Its role is viewing and adding annotations.


If your résumé was done in Pages, then edit the Pages document and re-export to PDF.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 29, 2022 7:25 PM in response to Tiberio1986

Pages can neither open a PDF nor edit it. You can drag and drop a single-page PDF onto a Pages document as a document object, but you are restricted to scaling or rotating that object, not revising it. Apple's Preview can open a PDF, but not change the underlying PDF content because it is not a PDF Editor. Its role is viewing and adding annotations.


If your résumé was done in Pages, then edit the Pages document and re-export to PDF.

Jan 29, 2022 8:02 PM in response to VikingOSX

That's just the problem, the file is now only a fixed PDF. I have no idea how this happened. I always periodically go in and revise my resume, and I've always kept it the same file type. I do remember converting it to PDF a long time ago, but I've made many changes since then. Why would it suddenly be a fixed PDF that cannot open as a Pages document at all? This is very strange.

Jan 30, 2022 4:40 AM in response to Tiberio1986

Tiberio1986 wrote:

Why would it suddenly be a fixed PDF that cannot open as a Pages document at all? This is very strange.

You must have somehow lost the .pages version of your document. Perhaps it is still somewhere on your machine or in iCloud?


But there is no way that you could have opened and revised a .pdf version with Pages. Only Preview and 3rd party apps like Adobe can do that.

Jan 30, 2022 5:02 AM in response to Tiberio1986

You might be able to locate the original Pages document on a previous Time Machine backup with /Applications/Time Machine, or through the use of Spotlight. In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results panel, do you have Documents selected? From the menu extras part of the menu bar, use 🔍 and enter the following syntax choices:


Locate the Pages document created between two dates, or modified since the first of the year:


kind:pages created:06/01/2021-01/29/2022
kind:pages modified:>01/01/2022



Alternatively, if you have access to MS Word v16.31 or later, it will open that PDF and allow you to convert it back to .docx. Then you can open that .docx in Pages and avert copy/pasting.

Can no longer edit PDF on Pages

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