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

[Peter Williams]

Hello Sridhar and All Australian Ubuntu Users,

I visited the [2] site you mention below, eg:

[2] Open source, java: http://www.pdfsam.org/?page_id=10

And it _sounds_like_ a good idea. However, when I went to download the
executable version, I could only see a M$ Windows installable version and I
think also there was a Macintosh version there too. I downloaded the M$
Windows version and it appears to have run and installed correctly using
WINE. However, when I use the WINE menu to run the program nothing seems to
happen.

I also downloaded the java source code for the above program. Unfortunately,
even though the source file *appear* to be included, I don't know how to
compile it, and there seems to be no instructions included with the source
files.

This is rapidly seeming to be one job that will go into my "too hard"
basket. *SMILE*

Someone mentioned that OpenOffice.org 3.0 *should* be able to edit PDF
files. I'm thinking that maybe my best option will be for me to wait for OO
3 to be released and try it.

Thank you for the info and efforts you have made to try to help me with this
problem. *SMILE*

Fond Regards,
              Peter Eric (aka 'pew') Williams
from North Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

2008/6/23 Hamish Carpenter <Hamish.Carpenter at its.monash.edu.au>:

> 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
>



-- 
Fond Regards,
Peter Eric (aka 'pew') WILLIAMS

My free website is:
http://pewtas.googlepages.com (or) http://tinyurl.com/yuyejs

(please visit my free website and let me know what you think about it.)
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