Re: integrating multivalent pdf tools

[Ralph Aichinger <ralph mail pangea at>]

Sorry, long post for a mostly-lurker, but I *do* use
that functionality regularily and do have a strong
opinon on this.

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 17:21 -0500, Karl Schmidt wrote:
> > Quite interesting, thinks. But is this functionality very important for
> > the user?

Even if the functionality is important to the user, I am not
convinced it has to be included into Evince.

> I would find it very useful if most of the Multivalent tools were available from the gui.  They 
> could be down the menu tree aways.
> 
> Split and merge especially, but all would be great.

I use tools with similar functionality regularily (pdftk and pdfnup)
and would love to have a GUI application that does similar
things (extract pages, combine PDFs, expose PDFs n-up, watermark).
But I certainly don't want that functionality (which I need exactly once
a month) to bog down Evince and make it more cumbersome for browsing
documents.

It is the same wit Acrobat/Adobe Reader. On (Windows) Computers with
Acrobat (full version) installed, I hate it, when Acrobat opens instead
of the Reader, because it is much less friendly for just browsing.

And there is the problem of editing PDFs by accident, if you are not
careful. In 99% of all cases PDF is supposed to be read-only, and
you don't want to mess up that dominant use-case.

But I do think there would be a "market" for an app that is in between
a full PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat (that can edit individual PDF
objects like texts and polygons) and a pure viewer. 

An application like this (which I have wanted for years), let's
call it "Scissors", could have tools to reshuffle (by drag and 
drop of thumbnails), combine (drag thumbnails from one doc 
into another), n-up (an assistant?), mask (adding black or white
boxes for touchups and privacy, and yes, I know about the problems
of this approach), and watermark ("Copy", "Secret", "Draft",
letterheads). It would be complex enough to do what 95% of all
office needs for changing PDF are, but not be a full PDF
editor that is too complex for most non-specialists (i.e. 
office workers, not graphics buffs) anyway. 

It would reproduce (or just wrap) the functionality of pdftk

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

or Multivalent and make it accesible to the ordinary
guy (i.e. the church secretary). It would be killer  ;)
 
As much as I would love somebody to make something like 
this: Please don't shoehorn it into Evince. Keep Evince
lean&mean.

/ralph