Free PDF Editor! ???

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Well, not quite but close enough to it. I was searching for a free PDF printer driver, which allows for setting the page size of the “captured input” – that is, overrides the page size specified by the input file. I needed this to print out a PDF mobile phone manual as a booklet, with 4 x manual pages to fit on an A4 sheet. I found a really good one for the job – Free PDF Converter – doPDF.

In the course of my search, I also found PDF Reader – a free PDF Viewer from CAD-KAS. Now, the blurb says:

PDF Reader is a free program to view, modify and print pdf files. It is very small, only about 2 MByte to download. You can open, view, zoom and print PDF files. You can also modify pdf files (but you can not save them in the free version). You can add, change and delete text and pictures and print it out.
The big brother: PDF Editor

Sure, you can’t save a modified PDF with the freebie. But you can print it! And you can print it to the doPDF printer driver as… a PDF! I’d say this capability is by accident rather than by design. But it works!

I do believe that I now have a full contingent of tools for doing everything I need to do with PDFs. It might be best to keep hush about this one though, lest they find out and pull the freebie down!

Alan

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Hi Alan,

I’ve been looking for a PDF editor for a long time. I haven’t tried PDF Reader yet, but I recall from experience that PDF reconversions (meaning, printing to PDF from an existing PDF file) tend to be slighty degenerative, i.e., some pixelation results in images, and maybe additional margins are added to the text body. Does your combo (PDF Reader + doPDF) override these difficulties?

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I’d say that you’d have to try it and judge for yourself Diegol. The quick trial I did on this web page would suggest (to me) that the problems you mention do occur, using the default settings at least. There may be ways to improve on this, but I’m not expert enough to know. It has certainly given satisfactory (IMO) results for textual PDFs. Below are the options offered by doPDF.

Alan

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Hi Alan,

Yes, I’ll keep Free PDF at hand for rather simple documents edition. Since my machine is not what you’d call fast or uncluttered, I’ll stick to the already installed, PDFCreator which has been working nicely for me. If the output (edition + print via PDFCreator) isn’t suitable, I’ll give doPDF a try when the time comes.

Thanks!

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Just BTW, any idea why PDFCreator is such a big download (15MB)? Seems awful big for such a printer driver app.

Alan

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I assume you’ve downloaded the latest release.

My version is an old one: PDFCreator-0_9_0_WithoutGhostscript.exe and is only 6 MB big.

If you scroll down the download page you’ll find older versions with/without GhostScript. I bet the version you downloaded does include GS, but still wonder why such a difference.

My version of CutePDF dates from Feb-2004 and is only 4 MB. As far as I recall it did its job alright without any additional need for GhostScript. I’m not completely sure though, since I remember the next CutePDF releases to have bloated considerably, maybe because of the incusion of GhostScript in the installation package (leading me to think GS probably WAS a requirement in prior releases). Go figure…

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Edited by HansV to provide link to post – see Help 19

Great stuff Alan, but your own post 658,673, List Of Open-source Programs, has a (potentially, since I haven’t tried it) even greater treasure. An open-source replacement for Acrobat itself! Mind you, Office 2007 has (at last) the ability to save to PDF, but the open source program should have all the bells and whistles, and certainly editing.

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I did notice that Peter, but I didn’t investigate. I use MS Word (2000, 2003, 2005) to produce my source documents, then just print to a PDF driver. The one I use will produce bookmarks based on Heading styles, and reproduce everything else I want/ need. But sure, the replacement for Acrobat might go even further with PDF features. You’ve convinced me to take a look!

Alan

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I should have checked before I posted. It is definitely not free.

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I may well have missed something, but from Tracker Software Products Ltd – Homepage – Products for End-Users – PDF-XChange Viewer:

The PDF-XChange PDF Viewer (Free!)
The free alternative to the Adobe PDF Viewer/Reader – fully featured, faster and still Free !

View, Print, Export Text & Images and add content to PDF files, type on PDF’s in any font, fill and save forms and much more !
Includes Help files and Manual – adding 5.5+ MB to the download

Sounds to me.

Alan

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Sorry for the confusion.

I was writing about the open source PDF Creator, which is said to be free on the first page linked from the LOOP page you referenced, but when I followed the ‘new homepage’ link (which I had difficulty in getting), it was a German site offering a one-month free trial and sixty bucks after that.

That doesn’t exactly qualify as open source in my book.

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How odd ??? When I follow that link, I get to a page in English, which tells me:

PDFCreator has a new Homepage, you’ll find it here now: http://www.pdfforge.org

When I click that link, I’m taken to the free/ open-source page above.

Alan

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It works now, no question about it, so how I reached the page I did is a mystery. I think I have purged my History since then, but I might be able to find it.

The first page in the sequence, which has (and had) the same link has a German flag on it, and the link took me to a German site with a program that had five stars and a sixty-dollar price tag for an Acrobat-replacement program.

I’ll definitely give this a try now that I have downloaded it. Thanks for the tip.

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I use MS Word (2000, 2003, 2005) to produce my source documents

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[/indent] Word 2005? I must have missed that one!

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