Frustrated Editing PDF's

It never ceases to amaze me how difficult simple things sometimes become ridiculously complicated. Here is today's case in point. Using my new Canon scanner I decided that it would be a great idea to scan in a few pages of a book for later use for a trip I'm considering. I decided to build the pages into a multipage pdf which the included software can do, and I've accomplished before. It simply scans the page, asks if there is another, and I did this for the ten pages. Unfortunately, it doesn't show a preview of each scan.

I then went into the Presto PageManager program to see that the second page was cut off, and I had missed a page along the way when the phone rang. So I rescanned those pages and figured I could merge those into one pdf with the additional pages. So far, so good.

I quickly realized that while Presto PageManager can combine the pdf's into one, I can't go in and reorder the pages individually- in other words inserting the missing pages where they belong, and swapping in the cut off page for a better one. Should be simple, no?

I hypothesized that there must be some nice free utility out there just waiting to help a guy out of this likely common situation. After some "googling," I ended up on this page. I tried several of the software packages on the page, but none did the trick. While creating a pdf from a text or word file is no problem, and even merging and watermarking pdf's, the kind of simple editing I'm after is simply elusive. Of note, PDF Tools 1.2 was a nice little utility to keep in mind, and probably the best of the bunch, and did finally get the job clumsily done.

What finally worked was that PDF Tools enabled me to split the file open with each page being a bitmap image. Then in PageManager I was able to reconvert these individually into new single page pdf's. As a separate step, then I had to rename each pdf with a page number so they would be in the correct order. After this step was done (are you getting sick of this yet?) then I rejoined the files into one big pdf, in the correct order.

Ahh, finally success! Well actually, when I opened the final pdf I noticed that the text was no longer sharp and looked like it had jpeg compression artifacts, although it was still readable. By converting into a lossy bitmap compression the image quality clearly took a hit.

Like I said, sometimes things that should be simple just get way too complicated. I suppose the next time I attempt something like this, I'll save each page as a separate pdf, and review the quality of each before the merge as "an ounce of precention is worth a pound of cure."

--Jonas

PS: If anyone knows of a decent pdf editor that can do what I'm describing without all of these steps, I'd love to know about it!

Addendum:

After kicking this around a while, and based on the comments, I figured that there had to be a way to do this with Linux somehow. I turned to TechNudge's own Linux expert, Oldster, and this is the sage wisdom from the elder open source one:

I was thinking about the XPDF reader and realized I had tried it at one time and discarded it in favor of KPDF. Both of these programs are available in the repositories that come with the version of Linux that I prefer, namely PCLinuxOS. They are installed easily using Synaptic. Just takes a couple of clicks and they end up in the office/publishing file. I far prefer KPDF. It will do anything that XPDF will do and in a more intuitive manner with a better looking GUI and shows thumbnails of the pdf document pages on the left side of the screen. The font is easier to read in KPDF also, at least for me. I suppose it comes down to a matter of personal preference.

Once again, we have an example of Linux offering an option that Windows makes way too difficult. I tried the XPDF program for Windows, and I couldn't get it running. Too bad that there is no port of KDF to Windows. Too bad I'm currently left out of the Tux crowd.