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Someone sent me a PDF from which I need to cut a section.

Opening the document in LibreOffice didn't do, as it just shows the page as a big picture without a way to select a section of it.

When saving it as TIFF, editing it PaintShopPro, and reopening it in LibreOffice, the document is displayed as about 1/3 its size in PaintShopPro, even with zoom=100%.

Does someone know why? Is there a way to edit a PDF directly, saving the PDF/TIFF/PDF steps, ideally in Windows?

Thank you.

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Do you want a whole page or section of one page? – deveneyi Jun 29 '11 at 14:16
It might be easier to edit the source of the pdf instead of the pdf directly, e.g. if the the pdf is prepared with LaTeX it might be easier to edit pdf by editing the source .tex file and compiling a new pdf. – N.N. Jun 29 '11 at 14:56
Just one section in the page. I don't have the source, just the PDF. – OverTheRainbow Jun 29 '11 at 16:22
Problem solved: In Draw, for some reason, the page didn't take the whole page layout, and the user must pull the little green boxes to strech the image, before saving the TIFF as PDF. Thanks everyone. – OverTheRainbow Jun 29 '11 at 16:33

1 Answer

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Is the PDF a scanned image or was it created directly by "printing" from a document?

If it was scanned, unless there is some awesome OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the pdf itself is a big image, hence what you're seeing in LibreOffice. If it was "printed" from a document, then it should contain the actual text and be capable of being edited.

A quick test of this would be to run a search in the document for words you know exist in the document. If the words can be found, it means the document was "printed". If words cannot be found, it was probably scanned and is an image.

If the file is an image, you can only remove entire pages, or manipulate it like an image in order to cut sections out, but you'd probably leave artifacts and jagged edges, and it wouldn't line up correctly.

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I guess it's just a picture, as LO opens the file with Draw, and doesn't display the Find window when choosing Edit > Find. Why is the TIFF file displayed in a much smaller size in Draw than in Draw? – OverTheRainbow Jun 29 '11 at 16:25

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