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Can people edit pdfs generated from LaTeX? I know adobe has a paid program that allows the editing of pdfs.

I ask because I would think this wouldn't work. With a pdf generated from a Word, there is no code in the background that was need to make the document whereas some LaTeX documents aren't so simple in construction, behind the scenes.

Also, if it can be edited in this manner, we it be able to match the fonts? What if they tried to edit an image that is floating? Since the image is based LaTeX's best placement, would this screw up the document?

dustin
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  • http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/10037/586 – Torbjørn T. May 29 '14 at 18:28
  • @TorbjørnT. what are the constraints mentioned? Would the fonts match? What if someone edited a floating image? I read that post prior to posting, but to me, it appeared to be a question on inverse search than on using something different to edit the pdf. – dustin May 29 '14 at 18:30
  • @dustin For instance, if you edit misspeelled words, and end up changing the length of the line, you don't have the ability to reflow the text to adjust spacing. – cslstr May 29 '14 at 18:43
  • The PDF does not care what rules where used to make it. It is seperated from that once you make it. Unless it is protected people can edit it however they choose. That does not mean it is easy to do. But you can open a pdf in Inkscape and change it no matter where it comes from but the results might not flow well but that depends on lots of things. – collegeskier May 29 '14 at 18:46
  • @collegeskier how do we protect a pdf? – dustin May 29 '14 at 18:47
  • You cannot do it with LaTeX, but with some tools like Adobe Pro, with a password for the owner. You can just open the pdf from Latex and change those properties. If you really want people to believe what you wrote is yours the best free way is to digitally signing the document (detached signature) through something like openpgp/gpg. But that requires the other side to be tech savy. Note these are all theories and not things I have done. – collegeskier May 29 '14 at 18:56
  • Not sure if this it what you want but PDF XChange Viewer allows to add comments, marks, ... to any pdf file even with free version. – Ignasi May 29 '14 at 19:53
  • @dustin: You can 'protect' .pdf files with pdftk, at least to some level. –  May 29 '14 at 20:46
  • Protection on PDFs is not worth very much in my rather limited experience. It seems always very easily broken - even by accident. (But perhaps there are better methods I've not encountered.) – cfr May 30 '14 at 01:13
  • Note that editing a PDF will screw up the flow etc. just as much if it was created in Word as if it was created in TeX. PDFs from Word can be even harder to handle as anything other than very recent versions, at least, failed to embed fonts by default and people rarely managed to embed them correctly. (So even viewing them was problematic - never mind editing them.) – cfr May 30 '14 at 01:16

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