MS Word .docx formatting in Libre Office

users
#21

Hi :slight_smile:
I don't think PDFedit really allows you to edit the text itself either? Doesn't
it just let you move blocks of text around?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#22

Hi :slight_smile:
Ahah, I edit pictures and stuff in Pdfs using Gimp. Draw might do it and now
the official Draw documentation has been released i might be a bit more happy
about trying Draw. The problem with doing this using Gimp is that i can't save
as pdf from Gimp.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#23

Hi Tom.
You should be able to "Print to PDF" from Gimp.
steve

#24

So to clear a couple things up, first I am on a Mac, not Linux. Secondly, there is no particular reason I /have/ to use LibreOffice to edit the PDFs, I could use another PDF editor, but since OpenOffice was a suggestion given in a GoogleSearch, and I already used LibreOffice, I thought I would try it. Also, I was hoping to use something free, since this is not for anything professional, just for personal purposes.

I’ve used Preview on my Mac, and it does like 75% of what I want, but the ability to copy pages from one PDF to another and merge them or cut one PDF into multiple ones eludes me, which is why I was trying with LibreOffice. But as I said, it tends to try and read the pictures of words as text, and since the scans aren’t that great, it ends up just being gobbledygook.

I tried the plugin suggested in a previous post, but that was already installed in my default install of LibreOffice.

I will try GIMP and maybe some other image editors and see if they work for what I need. Any other suggestions are welcome!

Thanks,
Derek

#25

Hi.
In preview you can split and join PDFs. Print the individual page or groups of pages you want as a pdf.
Then in preview open the first pdf, drag subsequent PDFs into the thumbnail side bar viewer thingy in the order you want and then save the whole thing as your new PDF.

As for editing, if the text is text, I can edit it in Draw.
If the text is an image, opening in Gimp enables me to delete the current text (to a white background) and then type in new text with the text tool. From Gimp I can print to file as a PDF.

Then join the PDFs in Preview.

steve

#26

What you need is PDF Split and Merge (http://www.pdfsam.org/). It is FOSS and there is a version for MACs. You can split any pdf into separate files for each page and then recombine any mix you want into a new file.

#27

Thanks everyone!

Derek

#28

Hi

  You can look this other program:

http://code.google.com/p/formulatepro/

http://code.google.com/p/formulatepro/downloads/list

Regards,

Jorge Rodríguez

#29

Derek,

There are a few programs I use a lot to do what you want to do PDF-shuffler [1], pdfsam [2] and PDFtk [3].

PDF-shuffler is by far the easiest to use. PDF-Shuffler actually renders each page for you and allows you to drag and drop the pages to different locations in the file. It does run with python so should theoretically be able to be installed and run on Mac. I can see some precompiled versions [4, 5] on google that you may want to give a try.

pdfsam is good but limited in what you can do. That is only split and merge files. You can explode pdfs then merge individual pages but it is all done using file names, i.e. you can't 'see' what you are doing.

pdftk essentially gives you everything you need to access the pdf libraries it uses from the command line (i.e. bash terminal). You can easily join, split, encrypt any PDF files but again you can't 'see' what you are doing.

My current workflow is to manipulate the PDF using PDF-Shuffler then encrypt using pdftk.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfshuffler/
[2] http://www.pdfsam.org/
[3] http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/install-pdftk/
[4] http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/PDF-Shuffler.shtml
[5] http://mac.lisisoft.com/app-software/250898-PDF-Shuffler.html

[SNIP]

#30

Well, I don't know, I have it installed but I never use it. What I was
trying to say was only something like ”maybe there are other Open
Source software out there that is better suited for the task than
OpenOffice.org Draw”. I guess there were better ways to say it,
though.

Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg
ジョニー・ローゼンバーグ

#31

Hi :slight_smile:
I know. My post was less than diplomatic, sorry.

I meant that i haven't really used it either so i don't know how good it is. My
brief attempt with it didn't seem to do what i hoped so i was wondering if i had
missed something. My usual approach is to install a ton of different things and
give each a quick try so it's quite likely that i might miss something that
isn't immediately obvious.

After my post there were a lot of great posts in this thread, a lot of very
useful looking things and ideas. This issue keeps cropping up and this seems to
be the best thread about it so far.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: