Not a Vim user? I'm surprised. If you really, really want to maintain your edge
as a PDF Sage, you should have Pdftk, Vim, and the Pdftk Vim plugin in your bag
of tricks. ;-)
"quite trick"? I don't understand what you mean. If you're writing about the
decompression of the page streams within Vim with the Pdftk plugin, you should
be aware the Pdftk is based on iText. I haven't examined the code for the Pdftk
plugin; but it is clear from the screen messages that the plugin honors any PDF
password protection, decompresses/decrypts the PDF for editing, repairs the
PDF, and recompresses/encrypts it. Yes, that is quite a nice trick.
You should be aware that iText was not generally available 5 years ago, when I
developed the procedure that I outlined earlier. I didn't consider it to be
trickery of any sort, as I knew that Reader could do the decompression for me.
Today, knowing what iText can do for me, I'd probably develop an iText class to
extract the text content.
Thank you for the concession on editing creating invalid PDFs; but you were
quite correct. My advice to readers would be "Don't try to edit a PDF directly,
unless you are also prepared to repair the damage that you will inevitably do
to it." I don't agree on the "bad precedent" issue of editing PDFs, as it is
sometimes a very good thing to do in the interest of saving time, e.g., if the
document that created the PDF is not available, or better yet, if the PDF was
not created from a document at all (iText-generated). After all, editing a PDF
is a good thing to do with Acrobat, else Acrobat wouldn't have a tool with
which to do it. ;-)
'Nuff said, for now.
Best regards,
Bill Segraves
-------------- Original message from Leonard Rosenthol <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
--------------
Not being a vim user, I was unable to validate this.
So that's a quite trick that it is using to decompress page content streams for
editing...
I stand corrected about it creating invalid PDFs - though I still think it sets
a bad precedent ;).
Leonard
<snip>
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