write on a pdf

[Michael Havens]

Brian.... incredible words of wisdom! Thank you so much.
:-)~MIKE~(-:


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 6:41 PM, Brian Cluff <brian at snaptek.com> wrote:

> 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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