editable pdfs

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> Of course with the T text tool in Acrobat, it is just as easy to copy
> reams of text, if the PDF is "unlocked" to Xywrite or Notabene.
Not in my experience. First of all, you have to worry about carriage
returns after lines. But there's something more worrisome when you paste
text from a pdf. You lose a word here and there, and there's a particular
problem with hyphenated words the details of which elude me just now. Let's
put it this way: every time I have ever "pasted" text from a pdf to a word
processor, careful proofreading has always revealed a problem. The problem
may be small, but it's there. Perhaps this program deals with that?
But I doubt it. A pdf is in the end not formatted text but a precise
PostScript stream. It is above all not intended to be editable. PDF was
conceptualized from the start as non-editable. That every jerk in the world
wants to treat it as an editable format is unfortunate, and perhaps should
have been anticipated by Adobe. But if it had been, PDF would never have
come to exist.
What we really need is people who have the brains to send an editable
document along with the pdf, whenever there is a need. But that is way
beyond the vast majority of computer users.
There is only one true tool for editing pdf files and that is Adobe
Illustrator. But that's not much help with a text document, not least
because it is a single page app.