Okular moving

[Kurt Pfeifle]

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.

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).