PDF-editing programs mentioned below:




From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
To: vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] PDF Editing
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 17:15:23 -0800
X-Mas: Bah humbug.
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040722i

These links brought to you courtesy of feedback postings to a recent "Grumpy Editor's Guide to PDF Viewers" feature on LWN.net: A reader asked about PDF editors.

Reader evgeny said:

Consider Panda/Pandaflex (http://www.stillhq.com/cgi-bin/blosxom/panda/). If Java is acceptable, see pdfbox (http://www.pdfbox.org/) and pjx (http://www.etymon.com/epub.html).

Reader DrBubba said:

perl has the PDF::API2 bundle that I've used to break a series of pdf files down into pages and then reassemble them into a single document. This will require a little bit of coding on your part and the documentation with the module is a little bit spotty.

Reader tekNico said:

$ apt-cache show pdftk
...
If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic stapler-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

Author: Sid Steward <ssteward@accesspdf.com>
Homepage: http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk

[RM: See also: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/17/1943230]

Which in turn got two replies. Reader kfiles said:

And pdftk itself uses the handy Java iText libraries for actual PDF composition/decomposition. iText can specifically address the author's desire to modify PDF content inline. And if you don't want to use run-time Java interpreting, you can copy pdftk's technique of precompiling to native code using gjc.

See: http://www.lowagie.com/iText/

Reader liamh said:

I had good luck with "Mad Builder PDF Assembler" http://thierry.schmit.free.fr/dev/mbtPdfAsm/enMbtPdfAsm2. It took a little while to figure out - you have to create an assembly/disassembly script - but it seems quite versatile.


I haven't personally investigated any of this stuff, but I've been meaning to, Real Soon Now.




Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:05:30 -0800 (PST)
From: "Dylan Beaudette" <dylan@iici.no-ip.org>
To: "lugod's technical discussion forum" <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] PDF Editing/Data Entry Question

I have heard that Scribus can do things like this. I have used it for various tasks that I have traditionally used Illustrator to do.

Dylan

[RM: Scribus works by first converting the PDF to PostScript, which is cumbersome and can require experimentation to get right, depending on the conversion tools used and the versions of PDF and PostScript involved.




KWord
http://www.koffice.org/kword/

The KDE/KOffice "KWord" word processor can edit PDFs. However, in doing so, it first converts the document into its own data format, which can lose complex formatting.




GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/

The heavy-duty GIMP graphics program can open individual pages of a PDF file and edit them as an image. It can then output them only to PostScript.




mbt PDF Assembler
(the aforementioned "Mad Builder PDF Assembler")
http://thierry.schmit.free.fr/dev/mbtPdfAsm/enMbtPdfAsm2.html

This tool acts as an in-line tool for assembling/merging PDF files, extracting information from PDF files, and updating PDF files' metadata.

In assembling mode (default mode), this tool concatenates pages, in full file mode, or in pages list mode. In page list mode, outlines are not concatenated. However this tool makes it possible to add outlines via a definition file of outlines (-o option).

In extraction mode (-g[...]) (note informations, not data extractions) informations are printed on the standard output in a CSV format.[...]

In update mode (-u) the files matching the mask(s), are uptaded according to the command line options.[...]

[RM: You can also use this utility to add page numbers to existing PDFs.]




PDFedit
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit

PDFedit offers complete native editing of PDF documents. You can either change raw PDF objects (for advanced users) or use predefined GUI functions. Tool can be used from either the GUI or the command line. Functions can be easily added, as everything is based on a scriptng facility. The qt 3.x graphics widget set is required. Code is in C++, with calls to xpdf, qt, and QSA. This utility is at beta version 0.2.5 level as of 2007-03.

Review: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/09/1810218