'pdfedit' with Qt (was: "Okular moving")

[Kurt Pfeifle]

On Saturday 02 December 2006 15:42, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> On Saturday 02 December 2006 14:01, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> > Am Sam Dez 2 2006 schrieb Kurt Pfeifle:
> > > > One more functionality that I would have needed  twice: Change the page
> > > > size of some pages. In particular, I had a PDF that was used for printing
> > > > a journal, so it had those additional margins. Now, to print them on our
> > > > laser printer (and to make them available for download from our
> > > > homepage), I needed to cut away those margins.
> > >
> > > I don't fully understand what you mean.
> > >
> > > However, the (probably similar) requirement to print a Letter-sized
> > > PDF document to A4 paper occurs quite frequently for many users who
> > > handle US (business or academic) documents in Europe (and vice versa).
> > 
> > No, I have a PDF that is used for offset printing and thus has the margins 
> > that will later be cut away. In particular, it's an A5 journal, but the PDF 
> > is in A4.
> > If you print that document on a laser printer, you'll also get those margins, 
> > which are simply wasted space. You can't print that document as a brochure in 
> > KDE unless you manage to cut away the margins before printing.
> > 
> > Attached is one page from such a document to make it clear what I mean.
> 
> Now I understand.
> 
> What you'd need is a "crop" functionality.
> 
> Cheers,
> Kurt


Has anyone ever looked at "pdfedit"? 

   http://pdfedit.petricek.net/pdfedit.index_e

I found it half an hour ago; looks to me like an extremely promising 
application, that lets you manipulate all PDF objects embedded in the 
file. It is based on Qt, has a GUI as well as a commandline interface 
and is completely scriptable (using QSA).

Admittedly it's not suitable for the more "simple" use cases discussed
in the previous thread ("Okular moving"). It's more like emacs offered
to Windows users instead of Notepad for note writing... :-)

However, it could become a powerful tool for professional users.

Advanced PDF experts can change raw PDF objects and streams (using the
commands and manually typed-in function names); beginners use the pre-
defined GUI functions. 

More functions can be added quite easily because of the scripting (QSA 
from Trolltech) support.

Of course, I don't know about its stability and maturity (it's version
is 0.2.2).

Screenshots: http://pdfedit.petricek.net/pdfedit.ss_e

Oh, and there is a klik recipe (use klik://pdfedit as usual); more 
details at http://pdfedit.klik.atekon.de/

(Things like the cropping functions required by Reinhold should be easy
though. Reinhold, if you have a closer look at 'pdfedit' + report back, 
I'll tell you how you can use the combination of 'pdftk', 'sed' and 
'bash' commands in order to change the CropBox of a given PDF :-)  ).

Cheers,
Kurt