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So it claims to > Edit pdf like a word doc while preserving structure and format. While I'm sure there are cases where this works pretty well and can be very
by jfk13 6y ago
So it claims to
> Edit pdf like a word doc while preserving structure and format.
While I'm sure there are cases where this works pretty well and can be very useful, it may be worth noting that -- just like every other tool in this space -- there will be many PDFs where it simply can't work. It'll be hugely dependent on exactly how the PDF-generating application/tool went about things.
One simple example: suppose your PDF uses a specific font (not one of the standards like Times or Helvetica), so the PDF-generating tool embedded the font. (This is common.) Further, suppose the generating tool embedded a re-encoded subset of the font, including only the glyphs that were actually required. (This is also common.)
Now, suppose the edit you wish to make involves adding a character that was not present in the original document -- let's say you want to change the date from "May" to "June". But the original document contained no occurrences of capital J (in this particular font/style), and so the capital J glyph is not present in the embedded font. No "PDF text editor" can get around this; the best you can hope for is a "J" in some fallback (such as Times) that may look terrible alongside the intended custom font.
And as for edits that would require reflowing multiple lines of text, maybe inserting a new paragraph in the middle of a page, etc.... not much chance of this working out well.
Yes, a tool like this can (in many cases) make it possible to make minor changes (perhaps fixing a typo or updating a word here and there). To suggest that it can "edit pdf like a word doc" seems patently false to me.
- blitmap 6y agoWould be neat to do font recognition against available web fonts to try go find a match, then convert the web font to truetype or whatever format the pdf used, and re-embed the front.
- saint-loup 6y agoI learned a lot from this article (discovered on HN I think): What's so hard about PDF text extraction? https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction In a nutshell, PDF is fundamentally different than MS Word: it's a standard for visual layout, without notions of paragraphs or even words. As OP said, it doesn't mean the tool is useless. It could quite often come handy for myself.
- mehrdadn 6y agoOne of the weirdest things I've seen is a PDF where the text is complete gibberish if you copy paste, but perfect if you export it to HTML or Word in Acrobat. Never figured out how or why that might happen.
- _chompsky 6y agoseen that happen quite often with LaTeX documents!
- Tsiklon 6y agoI read somewhere (likely here) that this oddness comes from the idea that PDF is a way of structuring documents for print first, and presentation in a user interface is secondary. That the rendering of the document on screen is paramount as opposed to ability to manipulate the text itself. "These characters should be displayed at this position in the document precisely" It would make sense that exporting the document as HTML or Word would make this easier - as these document formats have different goals.
- bla3 6y agoFinding a font that matches the look of letters in the vicinity of the edit on Google Fonts or similar and embedding the missing characters from that font seems doable and should work pretty well. Figuring out more global properties like multi-column layouts and reflowing text is a much harder problem.