Question about PDF manipulation

[shoppa_classiccmp at trailing-edge.com]

>> [PDF's]
> Whether you wrote the PS by hand or generated it from another
> source, you have the PS. I want it.  But you don't give it to me
> and instead apply an irreversible transformation to it.

I'm all for keeping documents in their original source.  And
postscript is nominally human-readable source.  (Although much
machine generated postscript is garbage.)

But there are great tools for dealing with PDF's at a very human-
grokkable abstraction, both in creation and in picking-them-apart.
My favorite is the CPAN module PDF::API2, which is a joy to use.
It is certainly a lot more fun to pick apart machine-generated PDF
with PDF::API2 than to pick apart machine-generated postscript using
any tool.

For those on the "document front", you gotta see SVG.  It's way
more fun than either postscript of PDF, and those are a gas to play
with on their own.  Take the best of HTML/the web, the best of postscript,
and the best of Java and the best of XML, and you have SVG.  (I do admit
that I still despise HTML, Java, and XML as they stand alone.  It's their
combination in SVG that really rocks!)

Tim.