XPost: alt.windows7.general
Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 18:08:16 -0500, Paul in Houston TX
<Paul@Houston.Texas> wrote:
Ant wrote:
Hello.
I just installed 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 last night due to a HDD crash on my
old HDD with its Windows XP Pro SP3 and other old softwares. :( I have
to look for software replacements:
1. What is a good free PDF file editor to edit on exiting PDF files?
Basically, add/edit/remove texts and stuff.
2. I print to PDF files instead of the physical printer like from web
browsers, Offices, etc. What's a good software to do that? I am trying
to be paperless.
Thank you in advance. :)
The premise of PDF is that it is secure and text cannot be changed,
Sorry, but that is not correct. PDF files *can* be edited, if you have
an appropriate program, such as Adobe Acrobat, but not with a program
such as Adobe Reader.
Besides Adobe Acrobat, there are also many other choices. A Google
search will quickly turn up programs like PDFescape, PDF Pro, Sejda, PDFzorro, DocHub, etc.
Also word processors like Microsoft Word and WordPerfect can edit pdf
files.
I've never used any of these, so I have no recommendations for Ant,
other than suggesting that he (she? it?) download and try all those
that are free.
Acrobat has a variety of security levels, in terms of
strength of key.
The first irritant, is naive users of Distiller, leave
the default security level enabled. This causes older
versions of Acrobat to throw up messages. It seems modern
users of Distiller are not capable of reviewing the security
settings and setting them properly.
There is at least one product, which can break the password
on Acrobat files. It can find all but one level of key in
a relatively short interval. It's possible the highest level
is something like AES128 or similar. That product is
available in trim levels, up to $500 a copy. The top level
might require several days to attempt to crack the highest
level of PDF security (brute force attack). In most cases
though, you're dealing with clueless Distiller users, and
this level of tool is not required. Still, if you need it,
it's comforting to know that moderate-strength protection
can be removed.
The moral of the story is, if you don't want someone
to have a piece of information, don't give it to them :-)
Giving people a digital puzzle to solve, they'll
eventually figure it out. Even if it costs $500
to do it...
*******
Look for mupdf/mutool, to perform "trivial" cleaning.
This is for cases where the nuisance level of protection
is present.
For example, a couple days ago, I needed to copy a couple
lines of text from an Asus motherboard manual. Using mutool
I was able to remove the "Cannot copy" protection from
the document.
MuPDF is hosted on the same site as GhostScript.
http://ghostscript.com/download/
http://mupdf.com/downloads/mupdf-1.9a-windows.zip
mupdf-gl can view PDF files.
mutool.exe is useful for command line cleaning.
usage: mutool <command> [options]
draw -- convert document
run -- run javascript
clean -- rewrite pdf file
extract -- extract font and image resources
info -- show information about pdf resources
pages -- show information about pdf pages
poster -- split large page into many tiles
show -- show internal pdf objects
create -- create pdf document
merge -- merge pages from multiple pdf sources into a new pdf
For example:
mutool clean annoying_Intel_doc.pdf pleasant_to_use_Intel_doc.pdf
The merge capability is something new, and I'll be
testing that later today for a little project :-)
*******
PostScript ("the printer language") and PDF ("the document language")
are actually computer programming languages.
When you use a PDF editor, you are asking it to recognize
subroutines in a computer program, and do something
intelligent with them. And it's for this reason,
that I expect you will sooner or later run into
a situation where this causes a problem.
For example, feed this to that "impressive" PDF editor
you found, and see if you can edit it. Or at least
think about whether it's reasonable to even attempt
to edit this.
http://ecee.colorado.edu/~kuester/smith/smith.pdf
It's not really all that tricky, that one. The original
work of art, was smith.ps. And smith.ps was written
from first principles, as a computer programming challenge.
The author of it, wrote subroutines in the PostScript language
by hand, to draw that stuff. (The document was not created in
so other tool and "printed" or "saved out".)
A tool at the level of Adobe Illustrator is required
to handle more complex programming constructs (maybe
it can edit text on a spline curve baseline?). The
other editors you'll find on the Internet, can be
used to edit horizontal or vertical text, and
convince you they're clever pieces of work. But
if you look hard enough, you can always find a PDF
that cannot be (intelligently) edited by them.
As an example of lameness, PDF going into or out
of LibreOffice, will leave you wondering what they
were thinking. LibreOffice can "import PDF", but
not in a way that I find useful. But at least
observing what LibreOffice has done, will
give you a feeling of how hard it is to do
a good job.
HTH,
Paul
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