How to highlight with Adobe Acrobat?

[OrbitzXT]

I just started working for a contracting company, and one of the things I've been tasked with doing is color coding some of the layout plan's symbols. Here is a small cutout of what I'm dealing with to give you an idea.

I tried the highlighting tool Acrobat 9 has, but it's not doing anything. I can't seem to get that tool to work at all actually, even with just text. One of my bosses suggested a PDF program called BlueBeam, and said it was more layout friendly, but I do not have a copy of that. I'd expect Adobe to be able to do everything I need, I just don't know how at the moment =p

So what's the best way to do this? If you look at the picture I included, it's just those symbols there that I need to be a certain color, like red for fire alarm pull stations and such, etc. Any thoughts on how I can best accomplish this? Thank you ahead of time!

 

[newtekie1]

Are those selectable as text, or is the PDF being treated as one big image with no text?

 

[OrbitzXT]

I believe it's one big image, which is why the highlighting tool wasn't working What can I do?

 

[W1zzard]

not possible in acrobat .. but you can load pdf into photoshop and manipulate those images

given the limited complexity i'd just recreate the symbols in something like illustrator, redo the pages, make a pdf, put all related source files into your document management so that the next person's life will be easier

 

[OrbitzXT]

Thank you for the input W1zzard. I have no prior experience using Adobe Illustrator. For with what I'm doing, do you think this will be an easy self-taught task?

 

[OrbitzXT]

A friend recommended the "Color replacement tool" within Photoshop, but I can't seem to get it to work or do anything. I am an extreme Photoshop novice, but I suspect it has something to do with this only being a single layer? This is what it looks like...

The red colored in square was used with the simple 'Paint Bucket Tool'. I suppose the bucket tool is all I need, but I do have one other little issue and I wonder if there is a faster way to do it. In the back of a layout it'll occasionally have the room name. In the picture here you can see in the back it says "STORE ROOM". The lettering interferes with my bucket tool filling in the area I need to, so I'd have to spend time zooming in getting the little pieces. Any thoughts on how to best handle this?

 

[W1zzard]

cut out the icon, clean it up, color it, put it where you need it, add text on top