Okular moving

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Friday 17 November 2006 21:40, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> On Friday 17 November 2006 17:01, Tobias Koenig wrote:
> 
> > Well, kviewshell can't _edit_ PDF either, it uses some external
> > libraries to do a subset of possible tasks.
> > 
> > If you want a _real_ editor you need an abstract document layout which
> > is loaded by the PDF parser and can be written back to file by a PDF
> > writer (neither the abstract document format nor the PDF writer exists
> > for Linux yet).
> > 
> > Poppler/Xpdf is a nice attempt but it was designed as a viewer not as
> > editor -> refactoring it into an editor is a PITA.
> 
> Let's start with simple things, that are useful to lots of people:
> that is a category of PDF editing which leaves the content of each
> page untouched:
> 
> * splitting a PDF document along pages
> * merging/concatenating 2 or more PDF documents
> * delete pages from a PDF document
> * insert pages into a PDF document
> * re-ordering pages of a PDF document
> * rotating pages of a PDF document (I receive more
>   than one PDF every week which has upside down or
>   rotated-by-90-degree, mostly from scanning and
>   converting to PDF while not paying attention)
> 
> The next level would be to edit on the page level:
> 
> * highlighting sections, underlining
> * adding comments and annotations
> * stamping & watermarking
> * covering unwanted sections with a black or white
>   area
> 
> I think these two sets of features are useful to everybody who 
> uses and works with PDF regularly at work/office or in school/
> /university, and who needs to print them out.

Let me add some more emphasize to the "watermark" item.

If done right, it would allow to add watermarks of any size onto
background or forground of a document.

This would be extremely usefull for anybody  who wants to create
his own "letter head paper".  Instead of printing on pre-printed
sheets,  any document could be "watermarked" with the letterhead
as needed (and save paper, time, money, hazzle, work....). Also,
users could create letterheads with any application they like by 
simply printing to a PDF.

> I am pretty sure these are easily in the reach of KDE4's lifetime.
> 
> ---
> A "Pro" level, useful to far less people (mainly professionals 
> in the printing, graphics, layout and prepress industry) would
> be a _full_ PDF editor. That means to edite content on the page
> level (exchanging images, correcting typos, changing fonts,
> adding or deleting or moving or resizing or rotating individual
> graphical objects).
> 
> That one would need to mimic the feature set of Adobe Acrobat on 
> Windows, plus some other tools like "Quite Imposing" and "PitStop 
> Professional". This would be nice to have, but I think is out of
> scope for us right now (unless a White Knight with coding skills
> steps up).

Cheers,
Kurt