linux pdf creator ?

[Michael Still]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, John Griffiths wrote:
> At 09:31 AM 8/29/01 +1000, Drake Diedrich wrote:
> >On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 02:43:34PM +1000, Jerry Cashman wrote:
> >> Hi people,
> >>
> >> Is there a toolset for creating PDF files on Linux (rh) ?
> >>
> >
> >pdflatex goes directly from LaTeX to PDF, and in principle can preserve
> >internal hyperlinks (unverified, but one of the reasons to bypass .dvi).
> >The same LaTeX file can also be used to produce fully internally linked HTML
> >files using httex (in the tex4ht package), and other formats such as
> >postscriipt via the intermediate .dvi format.  Internal hyperlinks from
> >footnotes marks to footnotes, table of contents to chapters/sections, index
> >to main text, etc, all fully automatic.
> >
>
> While on the subject of pdf does anyone know of linux tools to
> manipulate the acrobat file info "General Info" section? brought up
> using Ctrl-D in Acrobat?

This information is stored in the PDF file as text (albiet possibly
unicode text). It is fairly programatically easy to change the text and
then update the various byte offsets in the xref table so that the PDF
still works. Then again, I am not aware of a package that does this at the
moment... You could try looking in the comp.text.pdf FAQ
(http://www.stillhq.com), or at the tools pages at http://www.pdfzone.com
or http://www.planetpdf.com

If the length of the string doesn't change, then you don't even need to
worry about the byte offsets. Perhaps padding the strings with spaces to a
known length?

After this coming week I might have enough time to look into this sort of
thing... I wont make any promises though.

Cheers,
Mikal

-- 

Michael Still (mikal at stillhq.com)