Question about PDF manipulation

[Bjørn Vermo]

On 25 May, 2005, at 18:10, Barry Watzman wrote:

> Adobe Acrobat has almost unlimited manipulation capabilities.  You can
> rearrange pages, add pages (from almost any format .... word documents,
> JPEGs, other PDFs, scanners, TIFF .... just about anything), rotate 
> pages,
> delete pages, and export pages as graphic images (in just about any 
> format).
> You can export pages, do "whatever" to them, and reimport them.

In general, I have a strong dislike for PDF files for any other purpose 
than to prepare for printing.

It is not a format that is suitable for seaching, referencing or easy 
manipulation.
I want my digital information to be in a format that offers as much 
syntactical information as possible, and keeps presentation separate 
from content.
With generally available software today, that means an XML-based 
format. XML with CSS for styling works admirably for presentation, and 
untold numbers of free, often cross.platform, applications exist to 
manipulate it.

Please do not waste any time making new PDF documents, it will only 
make it more difficult to extract the information in a useable way 
later. If anything which exists in a PDF must be changed, it is much 
better to extract it into even a quite primitive XML or HXTML document. 
It might not look equally pretty in every reader, but it will be much 
easier to work with.
-- 
-bv