editing pdf files

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 9 October 2012 18:35, Gary Aitken <freebsd at dreamchaser.org> wrote:
> Can someone give me advice on editing pdf files?
> I have some forms I'm trying to fill out that contain labels followed by
> a bunch of underline characters and all I need to do is delete some of the
> underlines and add text.
>
> I tried using pdfedit but the modified file doesn't display properly.  I assumed
> it would take care of text placement, etc., but it did not produce readable
> results.  For example, removing underline characters and replacing them with
> "340007174" only displays "3400014"; "75-300mm" displays as "-300mm".  Am I
> missing something or does it just not work?
>
> Does anyone have any experience with the open office oracle pdf import extension?
> I don't see it in the ports collection,
> and I am not sure whether to even try using the linux version.
>

That a file is a .pdf doesn't tell you much about it, actually.

If the .pdf is just an image (eg a scanned document) you can
perhaps import it into gimp, or export it as a .png.  You might
be able to OCR it, I don't know.

If it's a proper text document saved as a .pdf, you can surely
import it into open- or libre-office & edit it from there.  You
might also be able to export it as a .ps (using perhaps print/gv
or graphics/xpdf, or perhaps one of the tools from graphics/poppler)
& edit it with an even wider variety of tools.

Yet another option would be to use google docs (or similar), which
generally allows viewing & perhaps editing as an HTML document.
I don't know if google docs allows re-export back to .pdf, though.

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