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

[Gregory Piñero]

Wow, that sounds tricky indeed.  I don't know how much your commercial
package is but my boss probably won't let me spend much money on this
:-(

So it sounds like the best solution for me is to just generate a new
PDF for each PDF I want to make even though they only differ by a few
words.

A friend did send me a Perl script that uses these libraries:
use PDF;
use PDF::Reuse;

And it appears that his script can replace text.  Is that possible or
am I misreading his script?

Thanks,

-Greg

On 1/27/06, Andy Robinson <andy at reportlab.com> wrote:
> 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.
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--
Gregory Piñero
Chief Innovation Officer
Blended Technologies
(www.blendedtechnologies.com)