From kde-core-devel Fri Nov 17 20:44:51 2006 From: Kurt Pfeifle Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:44:51 +0000 To: kde-core-devel Subject: Re: Okular moving Message-Id: <200611172140.27856.k1pfeifle () gmx ! net> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=116379629120525 On Friday 17 November 2006 17:01, Tobias Koenig wrote: > 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). > > Poppler/Xpdf is a nice attempt but it was designed as a viewer not as > editor -> refactoring it into an editor is a PITA. Let's start with simple things, that are useful to lots of people: that is a category of PDF editing which leaves the content of each page untouched: * splitting a PDF document along pages * merging/concatenating 2 or more PDF documents * delete pages from a PDF document * insert pages into a PDF document * re-ordering pages of a PDF document * rotating pages of a PDF document (I receive more than one PDF every week which has upside down or rotated-by-90-degree, mostly from scanning and converting to PDF while not paying attention) The next level would be to edit on the page level: * highlighting sections, underlining * adding comments and annotations * stamping & watermarking * covering unwanted sections with a black or white area I think these two sets of features are useful to everybody who uses and works with PDF regularly at work/office or in school/ /university, and who needs to print them out. I am pretty sure these are easily in the reach of KDE4's lifetime. --- A "Pro" level, useful to far less people (mainly professionals in the printing, graphics, layout and prepress industry) would be a _full_ PDF editor. That means to edite content on the page level (exchanging images, correcting typos, changing fonts, adding or deleting or moving or resizing or rotating individual graphical objects). That one would need to mimic the feature set of Adobe Acrobat on Windows, plus some other tools like "Quite Imposing" and "PitStop Professional". This would be nice to have, but I think is out of scope for us right now (unless a White Knight with coding skills steps up).