PDF editing

Prev

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users@it.canterbury.ac.nz/msg46842.html

Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2007

> Don't know how, but I know that it did. Not a full editor, of course,
> but I *could* overtype as requested in the original post. That's what
> the plugins do. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

Acroread allows to fill in PDF forms, meaning you can type your text into the text field provided, but that's as far as it goes.

> Wouldn't do it on any document I could create, though, until the
> document had been run through some expensive Adobe software or other.

Yes, acrobat, it creates the input fields. Which is why it doesn't work for you: output from ghostscript or anything2ps can't create such PDFs. Not surprisingly when the format is half proprietory as I understand, Adobe must satisfy their shareholders somehow.

The plugin is probably the same as acroread, but it can be embedded into a web browser (like flash and whatnot).

Volker Kuhlmann

PDF editing

> Acroread allows to fill in PDF forms, meaning you can type your text
> into the text field provided, but that's as far as it goes.

and doesn't allow you to save it etc. Screw it up and close the document, you have to start again. With acrobat (not acroread) for windows you can save the resulting file. Very handy if you need to fill in a lot of those forms.

There is a wealth of info on the net about the API that adobe uses for these fillable forms, and there is at least one set of perl bindings to access the api and, eg, integrate form filling with a database. IIRC the perl binding is actually published by adobe, but don't quote me on that. Then again flpsed is a lot easier, and not restricted to forms that are set up as fillable by their author.

There is also a python program that will create form fillable pdf's (http://www.reportlab.org/). And scribus will do it in a more graphical fashion.

Nick Rout

PDF editing

> > I know that the answer has been onlist, but my searching is in vain ...
> >
> > What's a good way to edit (specifically, overtype onto) PDF documents,
> > under Linux?
>
> Ross Drummond is the man who showed us at a meeting.
>
> Was it pdf2ps?
>
> http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/pdf2ps1.html[]

No, it was flpsed.

Do you know that flpsed is scriptable?

Create a postscript file.

Open it in flpsed. Create a tag on the document by clicking at the insertion point and go to the Tags —> Edit Tags menu. Name your tag, rinse repeat. For the example below I created two tags, soup and main. Save your changes as a postscript file. This file is the template file for your script.

Here is a script example:

flpsed -b -t soup=mushroom -t main=roast menu-template.ps menu.ps
lpr -P Printer menu.ps

Ross Drummond

PDF editing

flpsed

enables you to fill out PDF forms under linux...was this what you guys were
thinking of?

That's what I was thinking of, yes.

But the phrase "fill out PDF forms" has a very precise and technical meaning in the PDF world, and isn't the facility I was thinking of. I just wanted to overtype the PDF itself, the same as I would do if I printed it and went at it with a pen, only neater :-)

Job now done, BTW - combination of the gs-common pdf2ps, flpsed and ps2pdf (not the flpsed-default pdftops and pstopfd, BTW) has successfully written neatly on my pages.

Jim Cheetham