Lei Zhou’s Blog

I am using the flpsed to edit my PDF file. A very useful trick is, that do not double change your pdf as the following steps:
1, import pdf file, and edit it, then export it to a pdf file
2, import this file again and edit it, export it.
you will find you get some very very wrong results. the pdf file can not show itself properly. The first round of import-export is fine, but when you do it twice, many words added in second round are missing.
Hence, if you want to edit your pdf file for many times, always save it as a .ps file. When you need to edit your file, use the .ps version, not exported pdf file.

There are a few methods which can get this job done very well.

Basic method:

1. take out that page from the bunch (multipage pdf) using pdftk
2. use convert (imagemagick) to convert pdf to jpg
3. gimp
4. convert back to pdf
5. use pdftk to stitch the bunch together…

Goods: You can edit everything
Bads: Take you some time. The pdf file can not convert to html or text. Everything will be image.

Easy method:

• flpsed, which is “a WYSIWYG PostScript² annotator. You can’t remove or modify existing elements of a document. But flpsed lets you add arbitrary text lines to existing PostScript ² documents. Added lines can later be reedited with flpsed. Using pdftops, which is part of xpdf one can convert PDF documents to PostScript and also add text to them. flpsed is useful for filling in forms, adding notes etc.”

Bads: Can not change anything, only add text on it.

Complicated method:

• PDFEdit is a Free editor for manipulating PDF documents. GUI version + commandline interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in editor and almost anything can be scripted, it is possible to create own scripts or plugins. Target platform are operating systems of Unix type (Linux, BSD, …), we are using C++, XPDF, QT3 and QSA.

Bads: Not easy to install and use. Need time to study.