[vox-tech] PDF editor?

[Jonathan Stickel]

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