Access this pane from File > Preferences  on the Editing tab.

  • Unit of measurement
    Choose from inches, centimetres, millimetres, points and picas. This setting affects the ruler display and the units used in most dialog boxes when a distance or size value is required.
  • Default Editing Tool
    When a document is first opened, FlexiPDF switches to the Text tool by default. You can change this behaviour and have it select another tool instead.
  • Show changed text in:
    When enabled (checked) FlexiPDF will highlight edited text in the chosen colour. This highlighting will only be visible when the PDF is viewed or printed from FlexiPDF and will not show in any other PDF viewer.
  • Insert smart quotes
    When enabled, FlexiPDF will try to convert plain quotation marks as typed from the keyboard into “curly quotes”. This may not be possible if the font used does not contain either the opening or closing curly quotation mark.
  • Paste text with formatting
    When pasting text into a PDF from another application FlexiPDF can ignore or take notice of the formatting of the text. If this option is checked, FlexiPDF will try to replicate the format (font, colour, size) of the text as it is pasted.
    When not checked, text is always pasted using the current selected font, size and colour.
  • User-defined stamps folder
    The location of a folder containing user-defined stamps. By default, this edit box is empty. See Stamps.

Advanced Settings

  • Detect bold / overprint text
    Some documents simulate bold text by overprinting text rather than using a bold version of a font. Normally FlexiPDF identifies overprinted characters on each page and converts those found into single bold characters.
    This check can be disabled to improve speed on complex pages or if FlexiPDF is incorrectly identifying overprinted characters.
  • Detect tabs and Leader dots
    Prior to editing, FlexiPDF searches for sequences of dots used as spacers in tabular layouts such as the table of contents in a book. These leader-dot sequences are then converted into a leader tab. This means that during editing, the leader dots will grow/shrink correctly.
    FlexiPDF also searches for large gaps between words and inserts equivalent tab stops instead, which also makes it easier to edit tabular data and bullet lists.
    Occasionally this may adversely affect the layout of a page. It may also cause an initial delay on some more complex pages.
  • Detect underlined / strike-through text
    Prior to editing, FlexiPDF searches for all text close to a graphic line of similar length. It then removes the line and assumes the text was either underlines or strike-through depending upon the position of the line relative to the text.
    Occasionally this may yield undesirable results or cause an initial delay and may be disabled for this reason.
  • Include cropped text when editing
    When editing begins, FlexiPDF normally grabs all text on a page and converts it into a form ready for interactive editing. When this option is enabled, it will grab all text, even that hidden from view by a page crop. This is useful for searching text that would otherwise be missed.
    When disabled, you can use a page crop to limit the amount of text on a page that FlexiPDF will ‘see’. This is useful for narrowing the affect of a search and replace or for reducing unwanted layout changes at the start of editing.
    For example, doing a search and replace on a document’s page headers is difficult if the page header uses the same font and size as the rest of the document. How do you tell FlexiPDF to only search in the header and ignore the rest of the page contents?
    The answer is to disable this feature, place a crop around the header area using the Crop tool , then do the search and replace operation.
    FlexiPDF will not only limit the search to text within the crop, it will also leave all other text unaltered. After the search has finished, the crop can be removed by choosing Pages > Remove Crop to reveal the complete page text.
  • Diagnostic editing mode
    This option is included for diagnostic use only. It stops FlexiPDF from converting the text on a page into an editable form. Objects may still be manipulated but no text editing can be performed whilst this option is enabled. The option is turned off each time FlexiPDF is started.