PDF Editor or Converter for Fedora/Linux?

[Chris Mohler]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Tom Holroyd <tomh at kurage.nimh.nih.gov> 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