On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Tom Holroyd <tomh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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
