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My coworker sent me a paper that we are both working on as a pdf and I need to use LaTeX to continue to work on it. Can I open the pdf in LaTeX and edit it and add to it?

Martin Schröder
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Liz
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    Welcome to this part of the galaxy! – cfr Jul 24 '16 at 01:01
  • You can certaily edit the PDF file using tikz and overlay, but then you will have a edited PDF file, but if you want to get these changes back into the source .tex file, you will need to edit the source LaTeX file – Peter Grill Jul 24 '16 at 03:42
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    You deleted accidently the *.tex source file? – Keks Dose Jul 24 '16 at 07:26
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    @PeterGrill I wouldn't say that allowed you to edit the PDF. It allows you to annotate it. But that is not really the same. It won't let you add a sentence, for example, unless you want to add it into the margins are have space available. Or suppose you need to remove or add not in a sentence .... – cfr Jul 24 '16 at 10:23
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    If you and your colleague work together on the same paper, you should definitely consider an online tool designed properly for that purpose: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3/compiling-documents-online – Andrea Lazzarotto Jul 24 '16 at 12:54
  • @cfr: Yes, annotate is the correct word. – Peter Grill Jul 27 '16 at 04:43
  • To be clear: In LaTeX you edit a plain text file (with the .tex extension) that produce the PDF. If you want changes in the PDF, you must edit the text file to produce a new PDF. The PDF is the final outcome, LaTeX cannot change it. – Fran Jul 29 '21 at 16:40

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No. This is not possible. Your coworker needs to send you the .tex file which contains the source for the PDF.

cfr
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If you only have to add to the pdf file then the pdfpages package could help. But if you have to change anything on the pages your co-author has written then you're out of luck and your co-author will have to send you the latex file.

JPi
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there is a source code of xpdfedit, which is actually a mupdf viewer with a workaround to use TeX and comments, directly on the PDF. You can write annotations, like in TeX. www.gitlab.com/openbsd98324/xpdfedit

James Physics
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