PDF Editor or Converter for Fedora/Linux?

[Robin Laing]

Chris Mohler wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Tom Holroyd <tomh at kurage.nimh.nih.gov> wrote:
>> PDF is an output format. Much like the way that a C program is compiled
>>  into an executable, a source .doc or .tex file is converted to PDF for
>>  display. You need the source code to edit. Open Source!
> 
> I don't think C is a very good analogy.  All Illustrator files are PDF
> format these days and many programs can edit PDFs - I just haven't
> come across anything very good that runs on linux yet.  PDFEditor
> looks promising, but I don't find it usable yet. If you wrote a
> program that followed Adobe's specs, nothing would prevent you from
> reading/editing/writing PDF files:
> 
> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html
> 
> I generally have to convert a PDF to various formats based on what I
> want out of it, then recreate it in Scribus or OpenOffice if I want a
> new PDF.  I often use this script to pull out vector data:
> 
> <snip>
> #!/bin/bash
> 
> # you need gs-common, pstoedit and skencil to
> # get this script working
> export BASENAME=$1
> 
> #convert to ps
> pdf2ps ${BASENAME} ${BASENAME}.ps
> 
> 
> # Outline fonts
> eps2eps -dNOCACHE ${BASENAME}.ps ${BASENAME}-TEMP
> 
> # Fix bounding box
> ps2epsi  ${BASENAME}-TEMP  ${BASENAME}.ps
> rm ${BASENAME}-TEMP
> 
> # convert to svg
> pstoedit -f plot-svg ${BASENAME}.ps ${BASENAME}.svg
> rm ${BASENAME}.ps
> <snip>
> 
> Or I might rip the PDF in GIMP to extract the images.  Sometimes I
> open it in Reader and copy/paste the text.  Printing to file from
> Reader or running pdf2ps will sometimes yield a postscript document
> than can be imported into Inkscape - but that hasn't worked very
> reliably in my experience.
> 
> In the end, you *can* edit a PDF in linux, it's just often very, very
> painful - and I don't think that the pain is caused by anything
> "closed source" -   the PDF spec has been available for years.
> 
> Chris
> 

I just did a quick test with KWord and it opens pdfs for editing.  I 
don't know how good it is.  I understand OOo 3.0 will have pdf editing 
abilities.


-- 
Robin Laing