PDF Authoring tool, suggestions?

[Ltcddata]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 14:22:08 +0100
Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 07:26:39AM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 08:50:44PM -0600, Modulok wrote:
> > > I'm looking for recommendations for a BSD-friendly, PDF authoring
> > > tool (Not a viewer, see below.)
> > > 
> > > I have an image of a signature that I need to put into a PDF
> > > document. I converted the original, un-signed PDF document to a
> > > raster PNG, then used GIMP to place a photograph of the signature
> > > where I need it. I then converted the PNG back to a PDF using
> > > ImageMagick's 'convert' utility. The problem, is the PDF is now
> > > HUGE. Both in dimensions as well as file size. It went from 28kb
> > > to 292Kb. There must be a better way to do this.
> > 
> > Convert the PNG to a JPEG file with the gimp, then use jpeg2ps from
> > the graphics/jpeg2ps-a4 or graphics/jpeg2ps-letter port to convert
> > it to PostScript. Finally, use epstopdf from print/teTeX-base or
> > ps2pdf from print/ghostscript8 to convert to PDF.
> 
> hard to get good quality because the result is likely to be a raster
> image. Technically I'd do this with ImageMagick's composite - overlaps
> one image over another, but the output pdf will be a poor quality
> raster image and, yes, significantly bigger in size.
> 

Don't know if I am missing the point here but why not use open office
to create your pdf file with its export as PDF feature?