How to edit PDF?

[Derek Broughton]

Tony Arnold wrote:

> hometoast wrote:
> 
>> Adobe's Acrobat is a PDF editor/creator etc.    There ARE pdf libraries
>> out there (cpdf) that will create/edit pdfs but there (apparently)
>> hasn't been a lot of software with it implemented.
> 
> Adobe Acrobat is hardly a replacement for Word or OpenOffice as a
> document editor though, as I remember. It can be used to create tags and
> re-order pages etc., but it's ability to significantly change content is
> limited.
> 
> I think people are confusing creating and editing. 

I hardly think so, or we'd all have just been pointing to various ways to
"save as pdf".

> Of course, PDFs can 
> be created, but once created I do not believe the content is meant to be
> easily changed.

Look at it this way.  Adobe has, since early days, had the concept of a PDF
form - where certain data is fixed but the user is able to modify specific
fields.  It also has the ability to annotate PDFs. That's not editable in
the same sense as an OO document, but it _is_ editable, and I don't know of
tools to do that directly in Linux - only libraries for invocation from
programs.

otoh, I know someone who takes 3000 page PDF documents on a Mac, reformats &
annotates them programmatically, builds indexes, and then saves the whole
thing as separate linked PDFs - that's editing.
-- 
derek