[vox-tech] PDF editor?

[Jonathan Stickel]

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.

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.

Jonathan