Richard Chapman wrote:
Indeed. There are a lot of things MS word cannot do - but I didn't think
that was a good reason for OO not to do it...:-) Ms word cannot write
PDF either. I think some of the respondents here have missed my point. I
was suggesting OO could read PDF files in a read/write mode which would
be infinitely more useful than Acrobat and other readers. I understand
that PDF files may not contain some of the formatting information that
was in the original "Word" document or whatever created the PDF. But it
certainly contains enough formatting information to reliably place
characters on a page.
That's the problem. It exactly contains characters on a page. What it
doesn't contain is paragraphs, columns, frames, styles, headers,
footers, headings, or index entries, etc.. To a first approximation, a
PDF is essentially nothing but a PostScript file. You're asking OOo to
add a feature to make live pigs out of sausages.
There /are/ programs that can do this. But they're complex, and require
manual intervention at every step. Have you ever used an OCR scanning
program? A PDF-unmaker has to do nearly the same things. (In fact, a
general-purpose PDF-unmaker has to do /exactly/ the same things, because
many of the PDFs out in the wild are un-OCRed scans, containing no
information on a higher level than millions of black-and-white pixels.)
Even if it were desirable to have such a thing, it should be a separate
program (cf. Sibelius and PhotoScore), because it requires entirely
different fields of expertise.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne
of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- J. Michael Straczynski. "Babylon 5", "Ceremonies of Light and Dark"
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