[ot] Re: D hidden features topic for StackOverflow

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
> I might be mistaken, but I don't think editing a PDF can't really be done
> with typical text editing / word processing software. You need to either use
> the expensive Adobe Acrobat (full version),

Acrobat can only do very trivial edits.  Change a word here or there.
Crop the margins.  Add/remove pages.
If you have big edits to do, it's basically useless.

Adobe Illustrator is the app you need if you really want to edit PDF.

Doesn't change your argument.  Just a point of info.

> or some obscure 3rd party
> program from an obscure developer. Not that editing a PDF is needed nearly
> as commonly as reading one, but it is a problem that has bitten me more than
> once.

> Plus, the format itself is a bit of a kitchen-sink design. It's impossible
> for a program to fully support PDF loading without also supporting damn near
> every file format under the sun. And for something that's primarily a page
> layout format, I really see no reason for the added complexity that such
> flexibility entails.

There are free libs that do a decent job.  Probably they don't support
every ridiculous extension that Adobe has thought up, but they do
pretty good at rendering the majority of PDFs out there.

--bb