Re: Module Proposal: PDF Mod

[intech <macosx gmail com>]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 6:14 AM, David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com> wrote:
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> I love PDFMod, I find it very useful ad hope to one day see it grow to be a powerful PDF editing tool that retaining it's intuitive simplicity and elegance. I am though not convinced either that this is desktop material, it would help if we had some better idea of what kind of user PDFMod aims to please and what use cases we are aiming at addressing.
> E.g. I have often found myself reading slides or books in evince and pages of ads are inserted, blank pages or itemized lists being added over several slides which is useful during presentation but when reading the slides often can be annoying. In these cases it would be very useful to be able to call up PDFMod from evince and simply remove them. This doesn't though sound like a sufficiently normal scenerio to warrant presence in the default desktop.

I don't think its too hard to come up with use cases for this. Nearly
every time I do support, people are confused on why they can edit some
documents (those with the doc or odt extension) but not others (PDF),
but here are some realistic use cases (many of which are from personal
experience):
- Adam downloads a large instructions manual for his printer. He wants
to send instructions on how to setup the email scanner to his coworker
Anita, but not require sending the entire document to him. Instead, he
wants to just send the specific pages Anita needs to perform on the
scanner to Anita's email, instead of requiring Anita to find the
specific 2 pages in the entire 100 page document.
- Barry uses his scanner to scan documents, which automatically puts a
PDF in a shared folder he can access. After scanning the 10 page
document, he realized that he scanned an extra page. Currently, Barry
rescans the entire document to remove that extra page.
- Cindy received a document from her boss that includes graphs in
landscape layout and text in portrait. Using Evince, she currently
gets frustrated as she keeps having to rotate the document depending
on what page she is on, and she wants to fix the document once and for
all, with the pages rotated in the PDF to match her document, so when
she sends it out to others to work on, it appears correctly without
anyone else having to suffer through rotating each page like she did.
- Dan scanned the lease he just signed to keep a digital record of it.
After he finished scanning it, he realized he forgot to scan an
addendum to the lease and wants to add it onto the end of the PDF.
- Eric scanned all of the receipts for his recent business trip and
wants to get reimbursed for it. In order to make it easier for HR, he
wants to have the receipts ordered by date, but he did not insert them
into the scanner in that order. He wants an easy way to have the
receipts in the proper order instead of having to rescan all of them.