Re: reliable editting of any PDF file
On Feb 12, 2008 8:49 AM, michael <cs@networkingnewsletter.org.uk> wrote:
> I'm struggling to find software to edit a PDF file. Firstly, I'm wary of
> using a graphics editor to do the job and pdfedit [1] seems to reject
> many of the PDF files I've just tried because they are "linearised"
> according to the bug report [2]
>
> So what joy have others had, or is this the Holy Grail [3]?
I haven't found a good option. I took a look at scribus, but
certainly at the time it would use PDF as its storage format, but
couldn't read and edit non-scribus-generated PDF. I've settled on the
functional, though clunky, process of:
1) Convert the PDF file to PS.
2) Open the PS in both gv and emacs.
3) Use gv (with the "watch file" option set) to tell me where to
position text, and add it by hand in emacs.
For step three, I go to the end of a page (before the showpage command) and do
something like the following:
/Times-Roman findfont
12 scalefont
setfont
30 700 moveto (Hello World) show
That puts the string "Hello World" in 12-point Times Roman at x=30,
y=700, which is near the upper-left corner of a letter-size page. If
gv is watching the file for changes, then each time you save the
display should be updated, and you can tweak the position (fractional
coordinates are permitted). Since parens are used to delimit strings,
I'm not sure what you do when you need parens in your output.
Note that some files have so much custom formatting that this
sometimes doesn't work right. I've been pretty successful with it,
though. The more text you have to add, the more painful this becomes,
of course, and removing text or modifying graphics is a whole other
can of worms.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
http://36pints.blogspot.com
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