How can I edit the text of a PDF file without having the source file of it?

[Morgan Storey]

PDF995 is just a re-distribution of PDFCreator, which uses the gnu
ghostscript driver. So in theory as everyone else has said you can use
pdf2ps or any gnu pdf to text converter to convert it back and edit away.

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Hamish Carpenter <
Hamish.Carpenter at its.monash.edu.au> wrote:

> Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 at 15:40, "Peter Williams" <pewtas at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hello Ubuntu-Australia ppl,
> >>
> >> { I apologize for waffling on (below) however I figured that I was best
> for
> >> me to supply too much info rather than not enough. }
> >>
> >> I have a PDF file (eg an Adobe Portable Document Format) file which I
> >> authored quite a long time ago... back when I was using M$ Windows XP
> Home
> >> Edition as my Operating System. I now wish to edit the PDF file, however
> I
> >> don't know where the source document is, or whether I even HAVE the
> source
> >> file. From memory, the file was written using Micro$oft Word, and
> probably
> >> printed with PDF995 (M$ Windows print driver which creates PDF
> documents).
> >> [ eg PDF995 is available from the website www.pdf995.com ]
> >
> > PDF is primarily an export format - it was never designed to be edited.
> > However, there are some tools out there which can do it - pdfedit and the
> > soon-to-be-released OpenOffice.org 3.0 spring to mind.
>
> It is possible to treat a PDF like a canvas and draw a white box with new
> text over the old text. This is usually done programmatically and can take a
> lot of fiddling.
>
> It would also be possible to splice the original PDF with a new page
> replacing the one with the old url. This is probably the easiest approach.
> PDF::Reuse [1] will do this for you in perl but its API is reasonably
> complicated, there may also be GUI tools for this including PDF Split and
> Merge [2]. Extract pages 1 to 4 and 6 to 16. Create a new page 5, merge back
> together.
>
> [1] http://search.cpan.org/~nsharrock/PDF-Extract-3.02/lib/PDF/Extract.pm<http://search.cpan.org/%7Ensharrock/PDF-Extract-3.02/lib/PDF/Extract.pm>
>
> [2] Open source, java: http://www.pdfsam.org/?page_id=10
>
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>



-- 
Regards
Morgan Storey,
Senior Network and Security Consultant.
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