This article is taken from a recent thread in comp.text.pdf. The question was how to add comments to a PDF page without using Acrobat. A few interesting suggestions emerged.
The original poster, Kai Grossjohann, concluded at the end of the thread:
|
The procedure I currently use is to convert the *.pdf file into a *.png file. Then I create a new figure with xfig, insert the *.png file into the figure, draw my annotations on top of it, then export the whole shebang as PDF. The resulting PDF file is very large, but it appears to be readable on screen, and this is what the layouters need. |
Roland Baier offered this interesting idea, based on the way Acorbat 7 Pro can enable a PDF for commenting in Reader 7:
|
You could get one of those sample documents having "rights" (e.g. incometaxform.pdf) from the web and append your pdf somehow (using acrobat or something else). The concatenated pdf still has the rights and everyone can insert annotations (comments) and save the pdf with free Adobe Reader. There is only one drawback, the magic page which does not belong to your original document. |
OTOH, Reader 7 is not available for Linux.
Scribus was also suggested, but the OP couldn't get Scribus to open his page. Perhaps his version (dated 2004-10-26) wasn't the latest.
For my part, I am trying to find a relevant link I have around here somewhere. Along the way, I discovered:
Ghostview-Markup: This is a revised version of Ghostview which permits the markup of Postscript files, useful for commenting on a Postscript document completely in electronic form, with no need to print out the document and fax/mail it with comments. Markups may be saved to the file in one of two forms: Native ASCII, Direct to PostScript.
Aha! I found what I was originally looking for:
flpsed - a pseudo PostScript editor: flpsed is a WYSIWYG pseudo PostScript1 editor. "Pseudo", because you can't remove or modify existing elements of a document. But flpsed lets you add arbitrary text lines to existing PostScript 1 documents. Added lines can later be reedited with flpsed. Using pdftops, which is part of xpdf one can convert PDF documents to PostScript and also add text to them. flpsed is useful for filling in forms, adding notes etc.