[plug] edit pdf's under linux?

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 11:20 +0800, W.Kenworthy wrote:
> Does anyone know of an app that can edit pdf's under linux?  Seems such
> a thing doesn't exist.  I am downloading pdf995 to try under wine, but
> are there other alternatives?  I am not keen on acrobat distiller
> because of some of the things adobe does (web access by the app)

I'm unaware of any half-decent tool for it that's available for Linux.

You can do awful hacks like converting to PostScript and processing the
PostScript then converting back to PDF, but as others have noted that
won't work well if the text is vectors. It'd also suck rather badly if
the length of the new line was significantly different to that of the
old line, or if the original line is done with a series of independent
drawing ops instead of a single one.

Your best option is most likely to visit a friend with Adobe Acrobat
Professional and use that. Even better, find someone with PitStop
Professional as well, since that lets you do much more respectable PDF
editing than what Acrobat Pro is capable of.

As for Acrobat talking back to the web ... personally, I'd be more
bothered by the high three / low four figure price tag.

You'll find that Distiller won't do what you want ... you actually want
Acrobat Pro. The two come as part of the same package, and folks do seem
to get them confused. Distiller is much like ps2pdf, where Acrobat Pro
is like Adobe Reader, but can actually move objects around on the page,
delete them, resize them, and to a limited extent edit them.

--
Craig Ringer