open source pdf writer

[Stephen Allen]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 09:04:29AM -0400, Kush wrote:
>> Does anybody know of any pdf writer which can edit pdf files like adobe 
>> distiller does?
>>
>> I have seen many pdf readers --xpdf, kpdf, evince, adobe reader etc  and 
>> have come across the pdfcreator.sourceforge.net  for simple pdf creation 
>> using the ghostscript  system (ps2pdf) but haven't come across a  full 
>> blooded pdf editor yet.
> 
> PDF, like postscript and iso9660, is designed to be readable fairly
> efficiently, and is designed to be possible to create all at once.  They
> are NOT designed to be edited, short of reading it all and writing it
> all back from scratch.
> 
> Adobe's distiller is a very complex program, and I would not expect any
> competition to it anytime soon.  Most people are quite happy as long as
> they can read, print, and create PDFs.  Editing means go back and edit
> the original source document and regenerate the PDF from that.  It was
> never meant to be editable.

Lennart is absolutely correct.

Even Adobe's Acrobat, can't edit complex changes or many changes well if
at all. PDF is a final document format, and as such one is expected to
use the original application for major formatting changes.

The exception is the use of forms within Acrobat. At this point in time
I'm not aware of any OpenSource PDF form editor, but there are third
party commercial applications that can do PDF form generation.

PlanetPDF is a good place for all things PDF.
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