Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / December 2007

On Nov 29, 2007 Frédérique & Hervé Sainct wrote:

I'm another very happy Intaglio user. It is a lovely program to use, very
efficient and simple.

I do have Adobe Illustrator but more often I use Intaglio simply because I
find it so easy to use.

No, what for? A swiss army knife would be suitable to open almost
anything - apart from T8 or other torx which is located on many Macs.

Personally, I expected that GC might be able to open PDF or PostScript
at a certain level of quality - it's just a simple, unprotected PDF
which can be handled by any printer driver, many pdf viewers etc.
http://www.polizei.propk.de/file_service/download/documents/aufkleber.pdf

I'd be happy enough if GC would have done what I did: take a 100 %
screenshot. However, GC told me that it could open it (good, isn't it?),
but then presented an image as poor as a thumbnail.

I don't know about PDF and its technology. The image appeared worse than
anything that would have been available from an .eps preview (was it the
same?).

So GC could not do what I expected from it - and PDF handling should be
one of the major tasks on Macs nowadays.

While this is generally (and originally) true, there indeed are some
applications that let you edit pdfs in wysiwig mode, like the costly
adobe ones, costly graphic packages like Canvas, ligheter graphics
packages like Intaglio, and a german "pdf-specific" series of
applications that you can find at pdf-office:
http://shop.pdf-office.com/index.php?cPath=32&osCsid=ca6d10b92a82e04056f
75bbd0bc0d436
Now, pdf-office is *really* oriented towards pdf editing and only this
(but lots of, possibly with formula entries, etc.), when the others are
more general (and, in the case of Intaglio at least, easier).
Basically, it depends on your needs (simple and occasional vs daily and
heavy)

I don't know any real program yet that would permit to re-edit a PDF as
text as if it was the original word file.

What I would expect from a reasonable graphic converter is to render a
.pdf reasonably well - e.g. converting it to a raster image file with
sufficient resolution.

What I would expect from a good graphics tool, concerning text, would be
to take every single character, identify its charset, size and location
and convert this, character by character, to a suitable vector format.
(assuming that the pdf actually does contain text and font info, not
only a rasterized/scanned image of text)

A really good tool would be able to merge single characters not only to
words and lines, but maybe to real text blocks.

When you check e.g. for tools such as pdf2html, pdf2tex or pdf2rtf, you will see
that there are certain applications, both commercial and freeware, which
are able to get this done.

But what I got here was an image only.

What I did expect from GraphicConverter, which TOLD me that it could
open a PDF, was some suitable format for handling. I expected, what I
did afterwards manually: I openend the image by a PDF reader, zoomed it
to 200 %, made a screenshot and then edited this screenshot raster image
by a graphics tool.

I never asked for a perfect open and handling of the PDF, as if it was
the real document.

Did you check the URL that I sent?
http://www.polizei-beratung.de/file_service/download/documents/aufkleber.pdf
Did you give it a try how it looks like in GC or other tools?

What I did by now: I called pdfimages, a small tool which is part
of the xpdf package from Glyph
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/README
 pdfimages -- extracts the images from a PDF file
... it will extract every single image object within a PDF to an image
file of its own.

From the result I get the feeling that this image is a precise 1:1 copy
of the used image: 748 x 237 pixel, 24 bits RGB, reduced from the
PDF overhead, from 49522 to 42804 bytes file size.
That's what I call a perfect processing of this PDF file.
I don't have the results from GC around. I just tried gimp 2.0 for this
task - I feel it's better than GC, resulting in 374 x 119 pixels and
13582 bytes file size.

I use pdf2txt from this xpdf package many times - I see how well it is
possible to extract text from a pdf, just to a layout with simple .txt
output.

So I know about some current possibilities how to handle PDFs, by some
excellent and free tools, without the need of a full Adobe AcroAnything
professional tool.

Do you feel GC is suitable at all for this job? Could it do this job
better? I feel that it should be able to get this done, and better than
it does.  I never said that I would expect to handle every content from
any PDF format.

- Martin