David Bowskill wrote: > Dear Slug, [snip] > A question - does there exist an open source pdf editor/writer for > Linux - which can open and edit existing pdf files ? > I am presently using Xandros for my every day activities and > such a editor/writer would be useful. Searches of various sites have > yielded no joy in this regard.
PDF is designed not to be editable. It's meant to be a read-only format. (That's not 100% true, but close.) You're meant to keep your documents in whatever the original editable format was, and convert to PDF to "publish" them - this ensures they will continue to look exactly as you designed them even after they're distributed. I assume you created them using some word processing application? If so, you should really try to find something that can import *those* files. But all that said, the "pstoedit" package does a pretty good job of converting PDF into editable formats. (This is quite challenging when you consider the PDF could consist purely of diagrams, and that the text can be "painted" onto a page in random order.) On my Ubuntu system, one of the output formats for pstoedit is .svm: StarView/OpenOffice.org metafile, and others are plain ascii or .fig or .pic etc. etc. etc. HTH, luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
