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Free Tool to Edit PDF Files? - Impressions and Expressions of Ijon

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May 8th, 2006
01:24 pm

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Free Tool to Edit PDF Files?
What's a free (even open-source?) way to edit, as in modify some text, in a textual PDF file. Preferably without having to convert it to HTML or whatever, unless such a conversion can be guaranteed to preserve the formatting, which I bet it can't.

I've Googled some, but there's a sea of stuff out there, most of which seems commercial and/or inappropriate, so I'm asking you -- don't Google on my behalf, just tell me if you know of such software.

Thanks.

(I do believe this is called "appealing to the LazyWeb"...)

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From:gaal
Date:May 8th, 2006 10:42 am (UTC)
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I don't know for sure, but I think that's within what Scribus sets out to do.
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From:ijon
Date:May 8th, 2006 03:49 pm (UTC)
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It's a nice tool, and it's good that it's out there, but it choked on my PDF files, saying their format is "unacceptable". They were last saved by Acrobat 5.0, I believe. Too bad.
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From:themoniker
Date:May 9th, 2006 09:43 am (UTC)
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You need to link to the lazyweb site to invoke it, I think.
Ghostscript/Ghostview are probably the strongest free (and open source) tools for working with PDF; But of course, you want something to work with *your* PDFs, so YMWV.
I've seen someone use a Photoshop add-on (which sounds like the opposite of free....) that can extract PDF and convert it into an editable image (i.e, vectors you can fiddle with, not just blobs of pixels). I think that's the best you could hope for - a vector tool that lets you draw text by typing it onto the PDF.
Of course, you may also need to get past the Hebrew font barrier, the encoding barrier, the operating system (Mac/Windows, basically) barrier, etc.
Of course, I never thought I'd see someone say "Az Akitzer, ze OCR".
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