About PDF's editing.

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borgo1971
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About PDF's editing.

Beitrag von borgo1971 »

In most case, PhotoLine is a perfect tool to edit and modify my PDF files. But sometimes, I can't use PhotoLine directly because opening PDF make layout crazy, with unreadable text or at best with losing font type and spacing. In most case, my editing is limited to add some text and images, overlaying PDF itself, or cut out and assemble PDF parts. To do this (if the case that opening PDF won't maintain the layout), I've fond two ways:
1) saving PDF as bitmap with Preview and importing in PhotoLine as background image, but with a good resolution files can become very heavy, with low resolution files loses in quality, and even if I save in multipage TIFF, PhotoLine puts all TIFF pages in one document page with different layer (so I must create the pages and cut all layer to a new page);
2) using Apple Pages (that I don't like much, but in some case seems the best tool to do what I need), to add multiple pages, I must split the PDF in single pages file and add them manually to Pages layout.
So, my question is: could you modify or add a PDF import function to open/import PDFs mantaning any page as a unique object with 100% the original layout, letting resize/scale this objects (like Apple Pages), and giving later the choice to "explode" this objects to edit parts inside it (like PL does now while opening PDF's)? Or in worst case, can you add an option to rasterising PDF's on import holding original layout as bitmap image (but all pages in one pass, holding the same number of pages)?
Martin Huber
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Re: About PDF's editing.

Beitrag von Martin Huber »

borgo1971 hat geschrieben: Fr 17 Jul 2020 08:51(...) and even if I save in multipage TIFF, PhotoLine puts all TIFF pages in one document page with different layer (so I must create the pages and cut all layer to a new page);
There is an option in the preferences at "File > TIFF" whether the single images should create layers or pages.
borgo1971 hat geschrieben: Fr 17 Jul 2020 08:51(...)
So, my question is: could you modify or add a PDF import function to open/import PDFs mantaning any page as a unique object with 100% the original layout, letting resize/scale this objects (like Apple Pages), and giving later the choice to "explode" this objects to edit parts inside it (like PL does now while opening PDF's)? Or in worst case, can you add an option to rasterising PDF's on import holding original layout as bitmap image (but all pages in one pass, holding the same number of pages)?
There are usually two reasons why the layout isn't kept intact:
- missing fonts
- missing or incorrect encoding of text in the PDF file

In order to circumvent that problem, you can install Ghostscript. Sadly, the developer doesn't offer precompiled packages for macOS, but there are other ways:
- Download the precompiled version from https://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/
- Install it via Macports or Homebrew (only for Terminal-savvy people)

After that, you can use the command "File > Import > GS-Import" in PhotoLine to load your PDF. This command can optionally convert text to vector paths.

Martin
borgo1971
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Re: About PDF's editing.

Beitrag von borgo1971 »

Thanks for explanation. Multipage TIFF to single pages can surly be useful and using Ghostscript to import PDFs too (even it seems not present in PL32 version 19.5). But converting PDFs to bitmap or vector paths in most cases produce huge files, and the disadvantage (in some cases) to make text something other (unsearchable and uncopyable as text). Other software like Apple Pages, greatly less powerful then PhotoLine, are able to treat PDFs page as a single object, scalable and maskable, but letting text as text. I think it's a interesting way to treat PDFs, in addition to PhotoLine ability to edit PDFs.