Editing pdfs in Ubuntu September 11, 2005
Posted by Carthik in applications, office, ubuntu.trackback
flpsed is a useful app that allows you to edit postscript, and by extension pdf documents in Ubuntu Linux. You could use it to add text to existing pdf documents, to fill out forms etc, without using Acrobat Distiller, or its equivalents available for Windows and Macs.
To quote the author of this tool:
flpsed is a WYSIWYG pseudo PostScript1 editor. “Pseudo”, because you can’t remove or modify existing elements of a document. But flpsed lets you add arbitrary text lines to existing PostScript 1 documents. Added lines can later be reedited with flpsed. Using pdftops, which is part of xpdf one can convert PDF documents to PostScript and also add text to them. flpsed is useful for filling in forms, adding notes etc. GsWidget is now part of flpsed.
flpsed is released under the GPL.Features:
* Add arbitrary text to existing PostScript documents.
* Reedit text, that has been added with flpsed.
* The overall structure of the PostScript document is not modified. flpsed only adds the additional text.
* Batch processing (no X11 required) to modify tagged text lines that have been entered interactively with flpsed before. This is very useful for repeatedly filling in forms.
* Text lines can be imported from other flpsed-modified documents.
* Import and export PDF. Therefore it can be used as a PDF editor as well.
It is availabe in the “Universe” component of Ubuntu. I hope it is useful for those of you, who, like me, moved from Windows to Ubuntu recently.
Update: Also check out PDFTK - The PDF ToolKit - uber cool!
You can also use Adobe Reader 7 for Linux to fill up forms.
Yes, but that is not quite open source
The tools I mentioned here are useful to edit any pdf file - many a time I have wanted to add, say copyright statements or disclaimers to pdf files, and this comes in handy then.
say me please, one thing about this program:
if i created a prf file through ooo , then found that a some letters misses, do this app make that changes on that pdf file?
Scribus is the best check it out
thanks for this — just the info I was looking for (just got the proofs for a book that I need to edit).
try http://sourceforge.org/projects/pdfedit
I cant get scribus to even open the pdf. flpsed will open it but will not edit it. And pdftk must be command line functions that I don’t understand, I read the help file and saw nothing about editing. I went to sourceforge about the pdfedit but I dont know how to use a source package or the older version on an rpm. I’m running Ubuntu Edgy and pretty newbish.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PDFedit
Thank you cm!
That’s exactly what I was looking for
[...] can use flpsed as described in this blog entry. (But u will face several [...]