My understanding is that the PDF syntax essentially imitates physical printing in that it instructs the reader software to leave something at a given coordinate on a defined media with supplied resources. Thus it's easily portable but barely mutable.
So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand (2020)
101–103 of 103 posts
Re: So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand (2020)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll stop trying to edit PDFs when people stop sending me PDFs that I want to edit. Somehow it became "unprofessional" to just send meant-to-be-editable documents around for everyone to enjoy, so this is where we end up...
It isn't "somehow" there are some legitimate reasons why. When I send a client a final document (that's not intended to be edited) in a .PDF format you can almost guarantee that it will look the same to them as it did for me. When I send someone a Word document, I can't guarantee that it will look the same between different versions of Word, Mac Word, Pages, Google doc etc. I'm not saying .PDF formats are perfect, bu…
> When I send someone a Word document, I can't guarantee that it will look the same
Exactly! Isn't that wonderful? People can view it on a desktop, a phone, a text-to-speech engine if they want to have it in audio form... it all just works because the tags are preserved that show what's supposed to be a heading, where new paragraphs start, whether text to the right is a side box or a continuation of the line, etc.
> certainly more consistently presented to the end user
We all love horizontal scrolling to read your sentences, yes. Let's make everything preformatted text with a line length chosen by the sender. (Yes I know HN now inserts line breaks in code blocks now. Isn't it nice to have reflowed text?)Re: So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand (2020)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't the PDF format based on the Illustrator format? The weird thing to me is people using a distribution format as an original source. It's right up there with video cameras shooting an acquisition source as an MP4 and all of the negative baggage that comes with that.
1.4.4 Portable Document Format (PDF) Adobe has specified another format, PDF, for portable representation of electronic documents. PDF is documented in the Portable Document Format Reference Manual. PDF and the PostScript language share the same underlying Adobe imaging model. A document can be converted straightforwardly between PDF and the PostScript language; the two representations produce the same output when pr…
This is a very valuable link - just generate PDFs yourself by hand or script.