[Scribus] Re: Proofing and marking up PDF

[Peter Linnell]

Dear Neil,

I am taking the liberty of posting my reply to our mailing list as well.

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 02:23, Neil Williams wrote:
> Dear ScribusDocs
> 
> Thanks, Scribus is a great application and the documentation is very 
> well written.

Thanks. 
> 
> However, I had hoped that Scribus would have been able to help me mark 
> up PDF's like I can with the full version of Acrobat on PC or Mac.
> 
> I can get a PDF document into Scribus and add notes. My approach is open 
> a new document, add a picture, get a PDF, add a text object and make it 
> a PDF annotation. But this approach is cumbersome and has limitations.
> 
> Is there a better way to marking up PDF's with Scribus? Or is there a 
> tool available on Linux which is designed specifically for marking up PDF's?
> 
> If the answer is no, do you think it may be possible for me to use 
> Scribus as a starting point for developing a PDF mark up application for 
> Linux? Or are there technical difficulties I am not aware of?
> 
> Best Regards
> 
> Neil

The approach you have outlined is the best possible at the moment and I
would note Scribus has far more PDF capabilities in this regard than any
other application in Linux land.

What you have discovered while Scribus' PDF *creation* capabilities far
beyond most apps in Linux, *Editing* PDF's is another matter.  

Undertaking to directly edit, previously created PDF's, is a very
complex task.  To do so would require building a complete PDF parser  -
a complex coding task in itself. There are only a handful of
applications besides Acrobat itself, which can do this.  These PDF
editing applications are developed by ISV's who have a close
relationship with Adobe and possibly some NDA with them - none run on
Linux. 

I would note full Acrobat 5.0.5 and special Acrobat plug-ins like Pit
Stop and PDF Inspektor run fine on recent versions of Wine. I have yet
to be be successful with Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro 6.0.

That said, the Scribus team would certainly welcome discussion on this
for future versions.

Regards,
Peter
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