Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Video IM, Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and various bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 26 June 2009, 7:16 AM
It's All About the Tools
Yesterday I was working with some PDF documents, and realized that what I actually needed were a couple of pages which were buried in the middle of one multi-page PDF file. Fortunately, some time ago I had needed to do some fancy footwork with PDF files, and a quick look in Synaptic had led me to the excellent pdftk tool. It can split, merge, insert, delete, concatenate... pretty much anything you can think of doing with PDF files. Extracting the pages I needed, and assembling them into a new multi-page PDF, took a grand total of about a minute.
As I have been telling people for over 25 years, we can argue about operating systems until the cows come home, whether it is Unix, Linux, Minix, VMS, RSTS/E, CP/M, DOS, Windows or whatever else. But at the end of the day what sets the best apart from the rest is the variety and power of the tools on them.
jw
As I have been telling people for over 25 years, we can argue about operating systems until the cows come home, whether it is Unix, Linux, Minix, VMS, RSTS/E, CP/M, DOS, Windows or whatever else. But at the end of the day what sets the best apart from the rest is the variety and power of the tools on them.
jw
PreviousComments on this post
Well, you can argue, but Mac OS X has PDF support built right in so there is no contest. In OS X you can rotate PDFs, and do everything you mentioned above, in even less time.
You cannot edit a pdf using the OS X previewer. Re-read the article again.
Yes, you certainly CAN edit PDFs with Preview. You can extract pages, delete pages, reorder them, rotate them etc. Microsoft could have built this into Windows but Adobe vetoed it.
