[scribus-dev] Cropping imported pdf images.

[ale rimoldi]

hi john

> I have a situation where I can import pdf pages
> from an earlier edition, crop off the unneeded
> parts of the image, like the headline (title
> changed) and tick marks,and edit occasional
> text, for my current project. I also need to
> change the text from blue to black. I can do all
> this easily in Gimp but then I have a bitmap
> file. 200 plus bitmap files will blow up the
> file size unreasonably. So I have decided to
> import only those pages that have illustrations on
> them, and just crop the incoming pdf page file
> on these. It would be very nice if I could do
> the cropping and desaturation in Scribus. That
> way I could retain the text for editing and save
> a file that was vector in nature. But a true
> cropping feature like Gimp has is not available.
> 
> Has anyone thought about providing a cropping
> feature for Scribus comparable to what Gimp has?

getting scribus to crop the images is not such a bad idea... it's very
likely that you can do that on all the images in your document with a
small script using python and PIL or imagemagik.

but i don't see how that would help you in your task.

i see two good ways to do your job (which one i would use depends on
the context):

- for the text, export all of it with pdftotext (or pdftohtml) and load
  it into scribus *or* open it with evince and copy paste it column by
  column.

- for the pictures, export all of them with pdfimages (maybe export them
  once to png and once to jpg, depending on the type of images in your
  document) or open each pdf page with inkscape and copy paste each
  picture into scribus.

- for vector images: open the page with inkscape and copy paste them
  into scribus (you'll get the artwork and the text as vectors) or open
  the page with gimp and save the relevant part as a png.

and if it all fails, since you have 1.5svn, why don't you simply open
the pdf with scribus?

ciao
a.l.e