What is the best pdf editor for ubuntu?

[Luis Paulo]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Christoph Bier <christoph.bier at web.de> wrote:
> Luis Paulo schrieb am 17.04.2010 06:51:
>
> [...]
>
>> And when I wonder about PDF not being open, neither the software, I should
>> have said I think the software that produces *adobe* pdf format is not open.
>
> [...]
>
>> The point was that today you can't have a successful linux pdf editor of
>> adobe documents unless, maybe, adobe makes it.
> [...]
>> Because adobe didn't release the source of adobe acrobat, and I'll bet that
>> the format it produces is not standard.
>
> ??? I propose you discuss this with a real PDF expert (try
> comp.text.pdf). After your posting I did the same in the german
> newsgroup de.comp.text.tex. And ...
>
>> Not the latest version, not the
>> previous, not the next. It will always have a lot of non standard and
>> undocumented tweaks.
>> Again, may be wrong all the way, I don't know, its just an educated guess.
>
> ... yes, you are wrong. From
> http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdfregistry_v3.pdf:
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> When a new version of PDF is defined, many features are
> introduced simply by adding new entries to existing
> dictionaries. Earlier versions of conforming readers do not
> notice the existence of such entries and behave as if they were
> not there. Such new features are therefore both forward- and
> backward-compatible. Likewise, adding entries not described in
> the PDF specification to dictionary objects does not affect the
> conforming reader’s behaviour. See Annex E for information on how
> to choose key names that are compatible with future versions of
> PDF. See 7.12.2, “Developer Extensions Dictionary” for a
> discussion of how to designate the use of public extensions in
> PDF file.
>
> In some cases, a new feature is impossible to ignore, because
> doing so would preclude some vital operation such as viewing or
> printing a page. For instance, if a page’s content stream is
> encoded with some new type of filter, there is no way for an
> earlier version of conforming reader to view or print the page,
> even though the content stream (if decoded) would be perfectly
> understood by the reader.  There is little choice but to give an
> error in cases like these.  Such new features are
> forward-compatible but not backward-compatible.
>
> In a few cases, new features are defined in a way that earlier
> versions of conforming readers will ignore, but the output will
> be degraded in some way without any error indication. If a PDF
> file undergoes editing by an earlier version of a conforming
> product that does not understand some of the features that the
> file uses, the occurrences of those features may or may not
> survive. public extensions in PDF file.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> There are no secrets Adobe Acrobat products integrate. The reason
> why there are no FOSS PDF editors is the complexity of the PDF
> graphic format. Even the FOSS readers---at least I don't know one
> that does---do not support every PDF feature (e. g. annotations).
> Before the FOSS world needs a PDF editor it needs a full featured
> PDF viewer, IMO.
>
> [...]
>
>> Really appreciate your comments.
>> Just don't know what is "schrieb", but I'm guessing it's something like
>> escreveu. Kidding.
>
> You are right.
>
> Best
> Christoph
> --
> +++ Typografie-Regeln (1.7): http://zvisionwelt.de/?page_id=56
>
>
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Thanks, Christoph

I read many PDF, and I use PDF very often doing print from my apps.
When I, rarely, want to have the text of a PDF (more than what I can
do with a copy and paste), it's because I do need it.

So I use pdftotext/html or something alike, and work on it (format,
images, tables, etc...)

I'm sure I'm wrong in many things about PDF.

What you said on your post is good for a reader, but not so good for
an editor. Editors can't ignore it so easily (or just can't), and have
to try not to mess what they don't know about when they save the
changes. As your post mentioned too.

I don't really care much about editing PDF.
That to say that I may try to look into it, but I'll probably will not.
But if I did, I wont ask adobe.

http://pdfedit.petricek.net/en/kudos.html
http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/index_de.html

Main thing. If it is my pdf, I'll edit the source. If it's someone else pdf...

Another thing we seem to have forgot is that pdf may have security.
Back to cracking.

I think your final considerations about the pdf viewer are more interesting.

Best regards
Luis