Hi.
On Fri, Aug 03, 2018 at 11:29:07PM +0200, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I've been tried masterpdfeditor, in the .deb version from official site, and it
> seems to be quite powerful. Differently from xournal, it allows you to re-edit
> previous changes to the document, whereas xournal seems not to be able to do
> that.
xournal does not add text to PDFs per se. What it does is adding PDF
annotations. Probably. First versions of xournal cheated and stored said
annotation in a xml alongside with PDF.
> The problem is, that it is proprietary software that asks for money
> otherwise more and more `watermarks' are added to the document any time you
> edit it again.
That's to be expected. Nearly all proprietary software is written with a
purpose to make end-user's life as miserable as possible. Unless said
user pays, then it's twice as miserable.
Masterpdfeditor is not different in this regard.
> Anyone out there has experimented the matter and found a good
> solution to the problem of adding some bit of text to pdf documents? In
> particular, I want to add fingering notation to piano sheet music papers.
The answer is - it depends on what you really need.
If you need to add a PDF annotation without touching PDF itself -
anything that's based on poppler library should satisfy your needs
(evince/okular/etc).
If you need to add a real text to a PDF and have a time to spend -
you'll need inkscape or Gimp or that PDF editing plug-in for
Libreoffice.
If PDF batch processing is your cup of tea - it's called PDF::API2 in
perl. Ghostscript may be suitable too.
Reco