pdf editors

[Paul Sladen]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Philippe Landau wrote:
> isn't it astonishing that openoffice does not allow editing of existing
> pdf documents ?

It's not astonishing that OpenOffice.org can't edit them.  (At least to me!)

PDF is an encapulsation format and as such the only thing that can really
'edit' a PDF file is a PDF editor---The tools that do so most effectively,
Adobe's Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat systems are basically PDF engines.

KWord from the KDE Office suite does have some support for importing PDF
(that is, attempting to convert a PDF into an approximately equivalent Kword
document).  The import plugin is based on a hacked-up Xpdf and worked by
effectively drawing into the document anything that would have been rendered
to the screen if the PDF file were being drawn for display.

There is a major difference between being able to import from PDF, export to
PDF and actually being able to full-circle a PDF to the extend that can be
described as 'editing'.

pdflatex (again based on the Xpdf backend) is probably the most advanced
tool currently available to dealing with PDFs---although it's mainly a case
of being able to perform imposition and combining pages from multiple PDF
files into a larger resultant document.

	-Paul
-- 
I didn't know it snowed here!  London, GB