Yeah, I admit this was a risky statement :-) Editing the PDF just seems like the wrong place to place the edit since it is a format intended for interchange an

Yeah, I admit this was a risky statement :-) Editing the PDF just seems like the wrong place to place the edit since it is a format intended for interchange and archivation. Layering changes on top makes total sense. Changing existing objects seems fragile. But maybe I feel that way because the format is known for being so complicated and bespoke that only Adobe's tools can edit it reliably. Just about any document format which can be converted to PDF is easier to edit, therefore it would make more sense to apply changes before conversion to PDF, if at all possible. I agree that reading and scraping PDFs on scale is a very common operation.