Re: [Pdfedit-support] search and replace

[Michal H. <ms...@gm...>]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 09:29:56AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:51:57AM +1300, bazz bazz wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Michal Hocko <ms...@gm...> wrote:
> > 
> > >
> > > I think I understand what do you mean by that now. But, however, I am
> > > afraid that this is not possible with PDFedit inherently.
> > >
> > > The main idea behind PDF editing with PDFedit is in so-called
> > > incremental update document changing. This means that each new saved
> > > state of a document is stored behind the last one (more precisely only
> > > changes to the previous state) forming a new revision.
> > >
> > > This means that you can get to any of previous revisions anytime later!
> > >
> > 
> > That makes sense then, why the file size grows when I delete things. But if
> > I use pdftk to uncompress a PDF; delete things from the uncompressed PDF;
> > use pdftk to re-compress the file; I wind up with a file smaller than the
> > original. 
> 
> This is another way how to do editing. We decided not to go this way,
> because incremental updating is less invasive.
> 
> > I guess the compression step throws away the previous revisions?
> 
> This is not about compression (PDFedit uses compression for content
> streams [*] as well). Incremental update brings e.g. copy of each
> content stream even though one object has been changed/removed.
> This is in no way effective but it is intended to be this way to
> preserve the original content.
> If you need to manipulate with document in more invasive way then I
> would suggest conversion to some other format and regenerate PDF after
> editing.
> 
> > 
> > It might take a few extra steps but it seems like it can be done. Maybe that
> > functionality can be incorporated into pdfedit but as long as it can be done
> > with other tools my wish-list for pdfedit remains:
> >  1) search and replace / search and delete (scriptable!)
> 
> Tricky, but can be done
> 
> >  2) redaction
> 
> only with incremental changes restriction.

I gave it another chance and thought a little more about this yesterday.
We are not (and shouldn't) change the way how we do changes to the
document but we can add some kind of "flatten" feature which would
simply combine all changes to a separate document with the newest object
from the each revision. 

This would make the result document without history and also doesn't
break the current system (and philosophy) of saving changes. It also
shouldn't take so much time (in principle it would use a part of
delinearization code).

I have filed this as feature request
http://pdfedit.petricek.net/bt/view.php?id=289

> 
> >  2) search and redact
> 
> same as above
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks!
> 
> Thanks for feedback
> 
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> 
> [*] Content stream is the object which holds all visible objects on
> page.
> -- 
> Michal Hocko
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA
> -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise
> -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation
> -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD
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-- 
Michal Hocko