Re: [sc-dev] Use PDF as a watermark form?

[Roy Souther]

You missed the point. Not to edit the PDF but to create a new document that uses the PDF as a form or like a letter head. The new text, numbers or data would be displaied overtop of the original.

I think this is a lot easyer then you expect. OO already has the ability to use a graphic as the watermark behind a new document. The challenge now is to get a high resoution graphic from a PDF. Everything I have tried ends up very grainy and looks like crap when you print it.

If someone can point out any way to turn a PDF into a high resoultion graphic that will not loose any quality this way then I will write the ooBasic script that will do the rest. It would be very simple. But then, I am running Linux and everything is easy on Linux. ;-)


On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 10:57 -0400, Kohei Yoshida wrote:

Hi Roy,

On 4/27/05, Roy Souther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I would like to see a feature added to swriter and scalc that would
> allow me to use the them with a PDF as a watermark background. I think
> this would be a killer-app feature and a lot of people would want to use
> it.
(snip)

While I agree that such a feature (reading a PDF file) may be
tremendously useful, it would be a pain to implement it, not to
mention the time and resource required for adding support for reading
PDF.

This is because a PDF is read-only and non-editable by design, that
is, it is not designed to be easy for an application to load for
further editing.  It could be done, but in my mind that would be
probably just as hard as writing a OCR app that reads in texts and
graphics from a hard-copy printout (this may be an exeggeration, but
you see my point).

Plus, we are very (x3) short-staffed when it comes to development resources...
 
> Is there a better way to do this? Please let me know.

I would give Adobe Illustrator a try if it's available.  I know it's
not open-source (and it's a bit pricy too), but at least it has the
capability of loading a PDF file (just the first page, though, last
time I tried).

I don't know if any way of doing this right off-hand...

Kohei

P.S. This is probably off-topic here on this list, so for future
reference, please use a more appropriate mailing list such as
[EMAIL PROTECTED].  You will probably get more replies.

Roy Souther www.SiliconTao.com Let Open Source help your business move beyond. For security this message is digitally authenticated by GnuPG.

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