[Scribus] exchange data between Quark, InDesign, etc

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 02:31 -0400, Marvin Dickens wrote:
> On Thursday 28 April 2005 10:59 pm, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 21:08 -0400, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> > > The faults here lie not with Scribus so much as
> > > illustrating the problems associated with proprietary, closed data
> > > formats.
> >
> > If you mean PDF, then (a) It's not closed, though it is proprietary, and
> > (b) it being proprietary isn't the problem re editing.
> >
> > The problem is that what PDF is designed for is a final presentation
> > format. It's not designed to be editable. It does its job *extremely*
> > well, producing very accurate documents in many different viewers on
> > many platforms, with few problems with fonts, etc etc. Part of how it
> > manages this is by sacrificing editability.
> 
> To me,  PDF source looks like byte code with postscript roots. But, that's 
> another story. Using Acrobat, it is possible to do ____very____ minor
> editing:
> 
> re-typing text with the text-touchup tool
> move text or graphics one line at a time (Try that with graphics. It will be 
> more fun that you can stand - You won't do that but once)
> change font face, size, color of text
> delete graphics with the object select tool
> insert text using Ctrl-click with the text-touchup tool
> 
> The source for the above is:
> 
> http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/seminars/acrobat/pdf-edit.html
> 
> In short editing is, for all practical purposes, worthless except for the most 
> rudimentary and small changes. 

With just Acrobat Pro, that's largely true. It's mostly good for
cropping pages, chopping and changing pages around or inserting one PDF
in another, processing PDFs to, eg, reduce image sizes, and similar
tasks. It sucks at editing the details.

Enfocus PitStop _can_ edit the details. Even it isn't as good at it as a
DTP app is with its own format of course (nowhere even remotely close)
but it *can* do it. It's also a program that's even more expensive than
Acrobat Pro ... and requires Acrobat Pro to run (it's actually a plug-
in).

The point: it's really hard, and even the best tools on the market are
quite limited in what they can do and how well/easily they can do it.

-- 
Craig Ringer