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Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 13:19:07 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org>
Subject: Re: editing pdf files
Message-Id: <20121013131907.c666bfc2.freebsd@edvax.de>
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References: <5074A6B9.8040209@dreamchaser.org> <5078641D.4050905@passap.ru>
<20121012234628.GA11112@ethic.thought.org>
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On Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:46:28 -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> ive got a question that fits in here. hopefully.
>
> last week I found a book from 1901 that google had scanned and listed
> as a pdf file. it was text plus photos of the rich/famous of the
> 1800s. somehow, google found the exact string that matched my great
> grandfather [from the civil war]. I d'loaded the file (maybe 2mbytes)
> and searched using acroread. nada. I used the pdftotext utility.
> same: nothing but some 600 page numbers.
>
> my guess is that google just took photos of the book and used other
> tools to create a pdf file. I am not =that= serious about genealogy,
> but I would like to know if there are any tools to edit this kind of
> pdf file.
In case the PDF is nothing more than a compilation of images,
there's a way to deal with it for editing:
step 1: disassemble
step 2: edit images
step 3: reassemble
The disassembling can be done with
% pdfimages source.pdf .
Then the files can be edited whatever tool you like, e. g. Gimp.
They often come out in PBM format.
Finally the images can be re-converted to PDF and combined to one
PDF file:
for IMG in .*.pbm; do
convert ${IMG} ${IMG}.pdf
done
pdftk .*.pdf output target.pdf
Note the ".*" prefix for the file specification: The images extracted
by pdfimages match that pattern (at least in the case I tested it for).
If they get other names than .0000001.pbm, change the approach
accordingly.
--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...