Michael Leone on 24 Oct 2008 05:45:57 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] PDF Editing in OOo 3.0


On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 6:27 AM, Art Alexion <art.alexion@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

In my experience, the vast majority of users want to *create* PDFs,
not edit and change existing PDFs. But different places have different
needs.

> 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.

Most of those scans are not OCR, hence the result is not meant to be
edited. It would be more complicated to be OCR. And would take longer,
since the user would have to check it for errors. Much quicker and
easier to just give you an image.

They're copiers, with a scanning capability, not OCR scanners. Usually, anyway.
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