Journal timothy's Journal: PDFedit: Looks good! (If only it worked ...) 1
I'd like to be able to edit PDF documents, specifically by highlighting within them -- law school professors are big on distributing information in PDF form. That's something I generally applaud, but PDF (for good reason) isn't the easiest format to edit -- and being able to annotate and highlight is a great help in writing papers or preparing for exams. A Google quest for a way to do this using my GNU-system-with-Linux-kernel led to a brief but pretty good discussion of the topic at the Ubuntu forums. The program that sounded most interesting and applicable from that discussion is called PDFedit.
It's not listed in the repositories I have active in Synaptic, but rather than seek out and add a new repository, I was lazy, and followed a link from the Ubuntu Forums to a site called GetDeb. That site autodetected (or guessed well at least) that I was using a 32-bit Ubuntu system (or close enough -- LinuxMint, which is based on Ubuntu), and it was easy to find the
I copied a PDF file -- a course syllabus, 5 pages long and with no fancy formatting -- onto my Gnome desktop (rather than play with an original), and opened it with PDFedit. Because PDFedit was not yet one of the default applications with which my system knows to open PDFs, I had to first right click on the PDF's icon, and from the "Open with
PDFedit looks good, or at least functional -- it opened my test document quickly, displayed in the middle of a rather busy screen, with panels, sliders, arrows and input boxes everywhere. I rolled my mouse over the various tool icons in the menu area, and was glad to see that there are tools for quite a number of useful functions -- adding text, rotating the page in 90 degree increments (something for which I've been using a command-line utility called pdf90), highlighting, striking out text, etc. It also has an extract-text feature -- and extacting text from a PDF is a very useful thing sometimes, at least when the layout is less important than searchability, or using the same text in a different format completely, such as dumping it into an HTML page.
However, in my attempts to use each of these tools on my fairly simple sample document, I found that PDFedit didn't often do what I wanted, and even so it frequently stopped responding. The text-extraction tool worked only partway: it did grab and convert to plain text some of the contents of the file, but for some reason did not always grab the entirety of each line of text -- only about the first half of it. So of two lines
"Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow,"
I'd get something like
"Mary had a
His fleece was"
(That's for illustration only; the text stopped on each line was actually about 40 characters in.)
I tried it several more times, thinking that maybe I needed to select the text rather than call the command with no parameters, or adjust the windows so all the text to be extracted was visible at once, or adjust my feng shui, etc -- with the same (unsatisfactory) result. However, after reopening the file after a crash, and just about giving up, re-running the text-extraction tool actually worked, grabbing all of the right words and popping up a window containing the text, from which it can be copied into another document for whatever manipulations you have in mind. Since I couldn't determine any significant differences between my various attempts, it seems like a bug to me.
I mentioned a crash -- that was one of several I experienced in about 30 minutes of playing with the program. I never did figure out how to make the highlighting tool work; it's easy to temporarily select text (which creates a nice bright yellow background behind the text -- exactly the look I'm hoping for), but I haven't found any magic spell to make it stay. Select text with a rectangle and then hit the "highlight" icon? No. Click on the highlight icon and then drag it across the text I want to hightlight? No. Use the text selection cursor to select a single word, then highlight it? Also No. Each of the above followed by pressing the icon to "Reload the page (show changes)" also didn't work. That did lead to more crashing, though, and sometimes to a corrupted display of the text, in which some of the lines became jumbled and unreadable. (Could it have something to do with mine being LinuxMint rather than stock Ubuntu? I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible.)
I have not tried out many of the features -- perhaps many or most of them work fine. (What exactly does it mean to delinearize a PDF? There's a help file, but it seems mostly oriented to developers.) The screen is full of fairly cryptic information (useful, I'm sure, to some, but not to me), and the frequent crashing makes it a bit of a chore to play with. I did notice that the rotate-page feature worked fine, though, including saving. (No crash!) Unlike using pdf90 (which is great and -- but! -- utterly simple), PDFedit rotates only the page you're working with, which is very useful when a document you're reading on screen is set up with printing in mind, rather than on-screen reading, and contains a mix of portrait and landscape oriented pages. This small report may seem overly critical, but for me the program is useful enough to have been worth downloading for this selective-rotation feature alone.
I'd like to find some sort of tutorial on how to make PDFedit's highlighting and annotation features work. I hope that future versions are both more stable and more accessible to perpetual newbies like me, because it promises exactly the features I'm looking for, and many more features that might be supremely useful, if only they're coupled with a good explanation of what they're for and how to use them.
Others select text as well (Score:2)