Re: [PLUG] PDF Editing in OOo 3.0

["Art Alexion" <art.alexion@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:54 AM, Matthew Rosewarne
<mrosewarne@inoutbox.com> wrote:
> There's also a more nuts-and-bolts program called pdfedit, which edits the PDF
> structure directly.  It's very useful for tweaking, but you probably wouldn't
> want to compose anything with it.

I really believe that the whole point of PDFs is that they aren't
meant to edit. "Electronic Paper" was the way Adobe used to describe
them.  PDF editing was a means of adding form type elements. not
editing the PDF like a word processor.

That said, a constant request at work is for PDF editing software, and
there wasn't much worth using besides the Adobe product under any
platform, and almost nothing under Linux.

I tested pdfedit under Linux and though it mostly worked, there was no
way an occasional user was going to master it.  The cygwin version was
clunky as expected.

But PDF editing under OOo is very promising.  OOo imports the PDF into
a vector drawing making it easier for occasional users to manipulate.

I tested it on a few PDFs yesterday, and most imported nicely.  A
number imported as black on black.  Also, any kind of PDF editing is
useless with the scanner generated PDFs that seem so ubiquitous these
days: the PDF as a container for a single jpeg image of each page.  I
still don't understand why scanners bother with encapsulating the
graphic page scan in a PDF.  The  only way to edit them is to take the
extra step of extracting the image from the PDF, and attempting to
edit it in the Gimp or something.

-- 

--
artAlexion
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