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Am Freitag, 17. November 2006 18:01 schrieb Tobias Koenig:
> On Fri, Nov 17, 2006 at 05:36:23PM +0000, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> > Right. The problem is: none of the applications you mention can edit
> > *PDF* documents. And PDF is one of the core formats handled by these
> > applications we discuss in this threat.
>
> Well, kviewshell can't _edit_ PDF either, it uses some external
> libraries to do a subset of possible tasks.
>
> If you want a _real_ editor you need an abstract document layout which
> is loaded by the PDF parser and can be written back to file by a PDF
> writer (neither the abstract document format nor the PDF writer exists
> for Linux yet).

I don't think we need a _real_ PDF editor, but rather an application that is 
able to do the most basic modifications, like 
  -) extracting pages, 
  -) reordering pages, 
  -) turning some pages, 
  -) attaching some comments at a given position (without actually modifying 
the contents), like a speech-bubble, 
  -) add/remove password to the PDF, or more generally, change the DRM flags,
  -) etc. 

At least that's what I would need in my daily work here at the math 
department. If I write a paper myself or if I need to edit a joint paper, I 
have latex anyway to edit the document (which looks much nicer than any pdf 
editor can do) but I still might want to extract single pages. And if I 
receive a PDF from someone else, I don't need to modify the contents, but 
mainly turn pages (for scanned-in transcripts attached to job applications) 
or extract some pages (to distribute to my students or for inclusion into 
some other paper).

All these were real tasks that I encountered in the last few months, and which 
I had to work around by either printing selected pages to PDF (not optimal, 
as the thumbnail and the TOC gets lost), printing turned pages out to paper 
so that I could read them, or printing out the whole paper and marking any 
suggestions on the paper version (which is then faxed to the co-author).

Cheers,
Reinhold

- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: reinhold@kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/
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