[clug] Editing PDF Documents

[Keith Goggin]

Thanks to all I've made some progress with PDFedit and PDFs generally.

First I needed to "Delinearize" the document and save it under a new name to 
preserve the original. I'm still not completely sure what "Delinearize" means 
but perhaps it's not really required knowledge at this point. 

Then after browsing <http://pdfedit.petricek.net/user_doc.html> for about the 
third time it began to dawn on me how radically different this was to say 
word processing. Well ofcourse I knew that graphical text was an object and 
all that stuff but...

Having clicked on 'Select Text' from the 'Edit' Menu and once I REALLY saw 
that my text was just an 'Object' that was simultaneously displayed in 
the 'Page Space', 'Objects Tree' and the 'Property Editor' I was able to 
modify the relevant 'Parameter' in the 'Property Editor' and 'Reload' the 
page to show the change before saving the updated document.

Simple really :-)

But there were a couple of gotchas:-

Firstly the maximum length of a parameter and hence the maximum length of an 
edit string was one line.

Next adding a new line of text with Page 'Add Text' did work but the text was 
rotated 90 degrees and ran down the page instead of across it. Subsequent 
enquiry confirmed that this was indeed a known bug but for a minimalist edit 
like mine may not be a problem.

Further comments:-

I did look at Scribus but couldn't see it being much easier to crack than 
PDFedit.

I didn't feel particularly brave so I didn't try podofo.

Perhaps Adobe will release Acrobat for Linux, perhaps not but as Dave pointed 
out OpenOffice 3 PDF support looks promising.