[plug] [OT] PDF Conversions

[Bernd Felsche]

Craig Ringer <craig at postnewspapers.com.au> writes:

>The only tools I know of that can really significantly edit PDF are 
>Adobe Acrobat Professional ($$), which is still quite limited, and 
>PitStop Professional, which can perform major PDF surgery and make major 
>changes relatively easily, but is even more expensive than Acrobat and 
>works as a plugin for Acrobat (so you need both). I'm not aware of any 
>decent PDF editing tools that can be downloaded for free, let alone any 
>open source ones (though I'd be glad to be informed if there are any I 
>don't know of).

Another commercial package that can load PDFs for editing is
PageStream; somewhat cheaper than Adobe.
	http://www.grasshopperllc.com/

If you wanted to change files on the fly, using a script, it would
be possible using PageStream as it can be driven by Python, but
AFAICT, it still needs the GUI up and running.

>My personal advice - and remember that I'm no expert in this myself - 
>would be to find a simpler, nicer way if at all possible. Failing that, 
>you may want to spend some time looking over the (extremely extensive) 
>PDF and PostScript documentation. Who knows, perhaps you can come up 
>with a new and useful OSS tool for manipulating PDF...

PDFs can also be viewed by GhostView; so there's source code
available out there to interpret the internal objects.

First, go back to the original requirements and see if the job can
be done differently.
-- 
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