LibreOffice power feature: join text boxes after importing PDFs

Although PDF is primarily used as a read-only format, there are tools for editing PDFs – and indeed, many people pay quite a bit of money for these tools, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro.

But there are alternatives! LibreOffice Draw provides a powerful PDF editor, for free, and since LibreOffice 6.4 it has a great feature to speed up editing: the ability to consolidate (join) multiple text boxes. This is especially useful if you’ve imported a PDF, and the text content is spread across multiple text boxes, making it hard to work with.

Let’s see it in action. Imagine you’ve opened a PDF document in LibreOffice Draw, and there are lots of separate text boxes, like this:

This is fiddly to work with – wouldn’t it be great if you could join all of these text boxes together, to edit them as a single chunk of text? Well, in LibreOffice 6.4, you can. Just select all of the text boxes, using the shift key while selecting them, then right-click and choose Consolidate Text in the context menu:

Now, the three text boxes are joined into one, so you can edit the text as a single item:

Download LibreOffice and try it out!

See the online help for more tips and guides, and Ask LibreOffice if you have any questions!

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