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

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Divendres 08 Desembre 2006 04:31, Kurt Pfeifle va escriure:
> 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).

I contacted them one month ago trying to drag them to merge their xpdf changes 
back to poppler and their program to be a KDE one instead of a Qt one, but it 
seems the program was a result of some kind of University assignment and even 
they are interested in keeping it moving forward once the assignment has been 
already passed the time and motivation has suddenly been lowered so basically 
all i got was a "it would be nice but we have no time".

Albert

>
> 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