Re: [vox-tech] PDF editor?

[Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel@sbcglobal.nMAPSet>]

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Thu 18 Mar 04,  8:08 AM, Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel@sbcglobal.net> said:
>
> > Karsten M. Self wrote:
> >
> > > on Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 01:12:03PM -0800, Norm Matloff 
> > > (matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu) wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > Does anyone know of an open-source editor for PDF files?  All I want to
> > > > do at present is insert Web links into a PDF file.
> > >
> > > Norm, enjoyed your H1B pages for years...
> > >
> > > PDF is _not_ an inherently editable format (though this is a good way to
> > > get into a flamefest on some lists).  It's a publishing / presentation
> > > format.
> > >
> > > Your best bet is to find (or make) a source document and make your edits
> > > there, then publish to PDF.
> > >
> > > There are a number of tools which will let you work with files in PDF
> > > format (an operation I consider distinct from "editing"), and you may be
> > > able to overlay text from within these. 
> > <snip>
> >
> > If it's just a single page, you can convert the pdf to ps (use pdftops, 
> > _not_ pdf2ps), import it into xfig, write on top of it, and export back 
> > to pdf.
>  
> jon,
>
> karsten was right when he said that pdf is an output format
> (paraphrased).  postscript is even more of an output format.  i think
> norm's original email mentioned he wanted to edit some links.  maybe it
> was to insert hyperlinks.  that's not supported by ps AFAIK, so
> converting to ps, editing and converting back to pdf won't help.  he's
> looking for pdf functionality which isn't available with ps AFAIK.
You are right, Pete.  My suggestion is just a hack to overwrite text (or 
even diagrams) on top of an existing pdf.  I use this all the time to 
edit figures for inclusion in my own latex documents.  If the intent is 
too add the text of urls to a page (http://some.url), it can be done 
this way.  But if hyperlinks are desired, my suggestion will not work.

> > I'm not sure of the best way to work with multipage pdfs.  You could 
> > split it into single pages, work with each page individually, and merge 
> > them together again when finished (via ghostscript).  Of course, this 
> > would be rather tedious for large documents :).
> >
> > Pdftex is probably another option, but I haven't used it enough to 
> > suggest how.  I did discover a perl script which crops entire pdf 
> > documents.  It uses pdftex internally to do much of the work.
>  
> that's kind of wierd.  using pdflatex to perform actions on a pdf file
> is like using an assembler to write C code.  seems to me that it going
> in the wrong direction.  pdflatex turns tex into pdf.  turning pdf to
> latex is like trying to generate C code from assembly.  not an easy
> task, and the solution isn't unique.
Using pdftex for this purpose would also be a hack.  I was just thinking 
it might be possible to script the overlay of new text on top of 
existing pdf pages.

Jonathan
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