[reportlab-users] How to read and edit an existing PDF file

[Andy Robinson]

Gregory Piñero wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> cool library.  I didn't see in the documentation how I can read in a
> PDF file and just change a few words in it.  Is there a simple way to
> do that?
> 
No, that's VERY hard.  PDF is pretty close to write-only and it's
very hard to extract text, edit and re-save PDFs from all sources,
as there are numerous ways in which the text could be saved; a producer 
app might decide to render words in any order at all, or subset the 
fonts, in ways which make text edits very hard, and there is no concept 
at all of document flow, so reflowing a paragraph because you made a 
word in the middle longer is just impossible.

There are numerous tools to hand-edit on www.pdfzone.com of
which Acrobat itself is the main one.


Our PageCatcher framework (commercial) lets you overlay text with 
relative ease, and search for pages containing text.  Email me directly 
if you want to discuss commercial help for a specific solution.

Hope this helps,

Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect
ReportLab Europe Ltd.