Hei, > Anyway, as mentioned editing PDFs largely goes against their apparent > purpose which is as a terminal stage format. It's not for working > documents. Data spends a while in PDF form before heading off to the > printer and then the circular file system.
i'd think that's a bit of a historically based notion of PDF.
Adobe most of all is pushing for PDF to become something else than just
a pre-print format...it's being pushed towards being a document
interchange format.
But the major change goes on for a longer time and outside the actual
PDF format...it's the transition from paper based real world document
processes to purely digital processes. This means that data doesn't sit
in a PDF for a while until it gets printed anymore. Rather PDF actually
is replacing the printed document.
Likewise, Adobe wishes for PDF to play the same role in terms of screen
presentation. Scripting and presentation capabilities got added for that
purpose.
This characterizes PDF as a general publication format. Printing gets
rather secondary.
But that's not all...Adobe is also very much pushing PDF as a document
based collaboration format. If it were for Adobe, people wouldn't
interchange Office files for revision, but rather PDF ones. Just look at
Adobes PDF product page. There's a big banner there, saying absolutely
nothing about printing, but rather about "communication" and
"collaboration". Even more...click on that link an watch the
presentation. Collaboration everywhere.
Adobe wants to see PDF as the de facto standard content interchange
format. Interchange here meaning independent of:
- location
- platform
- application
- task
As such, the versioning and commenting capabilies are pushed.
But that's just Acrobat we are talking about here, you'll say. Right.
PDFs scope is broader than Acrobats. Adobe probably realized that the
market for Acrobat in it's historic form (up to v5/6) would die. So they
had to shift Acrobat's scope and hit a pretty good target with the
collaboration market.
But that tells us two things for PDF: first that it apparently is a
pretty well suited format for that purpose and second, that through
Acrobat, it will get that purpose prescribed to it as well as it had the
purpose of being a pre-press format prescribed to it 3 years ago.
That means that PDF will not be the end of the line anymore...it already
isn't. It's starting to play a major role in collaboration workflows,
which makes it three things:
- a publication format
- a presentation format
- a collaboration format .
> What might be more useful is to get to the bottom of why PDF editing is
> being requested and see if there isn't a more efficient and/or appropriate
> way to accomplish the same thing.
In publications production, classic Acrobat comes in quite handy to
enable people to rearrange pages for different publication channels.
Differences being as simple as i.e. using A3 or A4 capable printers,
where you would split an A3 page into two A4 pages...whereas you'd
rather join them for screen viewing.
Why you'd want to do this in PDF and not with the original document is:
- you may not want to hand around the original document
- application independance (pretentiously ;-) )
- file size
> I would suspect that PDF is being used a lot more than it used to be for
> platform- and software-independent exchange of finished documents. And,
> not knowing the limitations inherent in the format, people are now wishing
> to do the same with working documents.
Exactly.
> If that guess is correct, then promoting awareness of and use of
> OOo's default file format, OpenDocument aka ISO/IEC 26300, would be the way
> to go.
No, it actually wouldn't. OpenDocument is a great Office document
format. But it is just that. As soon as you leave that scope, the
specification couldn't help but fail, because it is designed as an
office editable source file format. It is not designed as a generall
publication, collaboration or interchange format.
"The document body contains an element to indicate which type of content
this document contains. Currently supported document types are:
* text documents
* drawing documents
* presentation documents
* spreadsheet documents
* chart documents
* image documents
"
This is ODFs major problem when it comes to replacing PDF. If i create a
document in Scribus, what is it? A text? A drawing? A presentation? Or
maybe an image? It's nothing and all of them at once. And that's because
Scribus isn't a classical office application that needs to make that
distinction. And PDF exactly doesn't do that as well (and office suits
as well as formats shouldn't do as well, but that's a utopia story that
i will bring up again in 5 years or so).
But the major point here is: PDF is the digital equivalent to a piece of
paper. OpenDocument isn't. Neither are InDesign documents or any other
source document formats. Which is because they are source document
formats.
However...what all this could mean regarding the original request from
my point of view is that:
a) No, it doesn't make much sense to integrate a full fledged PDF to OOo
converter into OOo, neither to implement a full fledged do as much as
you can PDF editor. Use cases seem to rare for that scenario. Plus there
are a few opensource solutions that can do something like that. Xpdf
comes with a tool to convert to text, html and a couple of other
formats.
b) There are already OpenSouce solutions that can do quite a bit of PDF
editing.
c) Basic functionality like opening a PDF, splitting and re-arranging
pages, extracting content and the likes would make some sense.
d) As a means of integrating collaboration assistance features in OOo,
PDF should be considered and functionality like adding notes and
comments, or possibly even merging them from an OOo document could make
quite a bit of sense.
André.
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