Re: reliable editting of any PDF file
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 02:22:20PM +0000, michael wrote:
> Yes, one of my requirements (portability) meant that I could see the
> (annotated) PDF on different machines/architectures *without additional
> files/software* ie the output is saved as PDF which is readable by all
> PDF viewers... (I would add that it should be searchable (by word) too
> which would seem to exclude graphical editors such as GIMP)
Then you are using the wrong file format. This is not what PDF is. PDF
is a portable document format, for distributing basically unmodified and
unmodifialbe files. There are ways around that as have been discussed,
but there is not one cross-platform application to do it since it is
non-standard for the format.
If you are taking an article from, e.g. a journal, and you want to read
and annotate at the same time, then pick a WYSIWYG editor that can
import images. Write a script that converts the pdf to an image and
plunks that image full-size in the file format for the editor. From
then on, use the editor to annotate the graphical representation of the
document and share this new document. When all anotations are done,
print to a pdf file again.
With this setup, now you have to find a WYSIWYG file format that is
cross platform that all your co-annotators can use. Don't ask me on
that. For me, cross-platform multi-user editing is done either with
plain text or LaTex and is not done from a GUI.
Doug.
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