write on a pdf

[Brian Cluff]

I forgot about a different method I recently discovered for getting an 
editable, vector based, perfect copy of a PDF with open source tools.

Install pdf2svg and convert your pdf to an svg like:
pdf2svg input.pdf output.svg 1
Where 1 is the page number you want to edit.

pdf2svg is one of the only programs that I have found that converts the 
fonts within the PDF to vector objects.

This will give you the most accurate version of the document while still 
allowing for the document to remain vector based.

Things to note, it does it conversion in a VERY efficient manner that 
can make editing a little awkward if you don't know what is going on.

Since all the fonts are converted to vectors, it would be very 
inefficient to draw every letter over and over again so pdf2svg only 
create each letter object once and then all future occurrences of it are 
just references to the original letter object in a new location/size.

This makes it so that the document won't be editable in the usual sense 
where you can just select text and type what you want in it's place.

What you can do is select whatever characters you want and delete them, 
and then use inkscape to type what you want in it's place.

If you want to edit the actual characters themselves you can find the 
master letter and edit it and the changes will be copied to all other 
occurrences.  If you just want to edit a single letter you will have to 
break the parent child relationship (Shift + Alt + D) before inkscape 
will allow you to edit it.

The pdf2svg documents don't appear to work with libreoffice's SVG 
filter.  It appears libreoffice doesn't support cloned objects, do the 
documents import without any visible text.

One last thing to note is that this method will also strip any other 
forms from the document, so if the document used to be able to be filled 
out via pdf viewers, they won't be able to after the conversion.

Brian Cluff

P.S. Did yo know that (Open|Libre)office are excellent at creating 
electronically fillable PDF forms?  So with scribus from what I hear, 
but I've never used to for that purpose, so I can't verify the output.

On 05/30/2013 11:11 PM, Michael Havens wrote:
> I'd swear I asked this but it isn't in the archives. Hans said something
> about acrostar but that was 7 years ago and I was wondering if anything
> new (better)has come about that allows us to input text onto a pdf. (the
> hans comment was in a thread with the words 'fillable' and 'pdf' in the
> subject)
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
>
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