[LAU] How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage

Simon Wise simonzwise at gmail.com
Mon Apr 5 06:43:30 EDT 2010


Nils Hammerfest wrote:
> The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by scans. So in fact we are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks here are to add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. or crop borders for a section, selection, all etc. and in the end save them again. I think with some scripts it should be possible to do the decrompress/compress thing from pdf->images->pdf but still this leaves the point of pagewise editing. I don't know for sure but I think gimp or inkscape cannot do this.

Inkscape only deals with single pages, and it is a vector graphic program so not 
useful for your purposes - you have multi page documents of scanned images. For 
tweaking page order, rotation etc - dealing with the document structure - then 
pdfedit works for me, but if you want to change the content of scanned pages 
then maybe use pdfedit to get the single page, something like gimp to edit the 
scanned image, then put the edited image back in the document using pdfedit.

All the pdf tools seem to do one or two things, but not other things - I find 
pdfedit the essential glue for dealing with multi page documents in a GUI 
way.PDF is a big format to deal with, and as someone said it's main use is 
distributing finished documents in a consistent way, but from time to time one 
needs to tweak such things.

I (only occasionally) use the pdfedit version that comes with Debian Sid - 
version 0.4.3.

Simon


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