Re: write on a pdf

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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