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Is it possible to import a PDF file (dissertation/thesis type) into LaTeX and trigger automatic corrections or even manual corrections? (Instead of typing the code in the left-hand side of the project)

Ingmar
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David98
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    Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking. – Community Mar 10 '23 at 15:05
  • Welcome to TeX.SX! As our community bot already notes, it is not clear what you mean with "automatic" or "manual corrections". Also, in which way do you want to import a PDF? Do you want to edit the contents of an existing PDF? – Jasper Habicht Mar 10 '23 at 15:29
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    Maybe your question is more along the lines of https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8503/how-to-convert-pdf-to-latex or the various linked questions at https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/linked/8503?lq=1? – Marijn Mar 10 '23 at 15:33
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    your question is not very clear, presumably you are asking about some editor, but you have not said which one. latex itself has no editor interface or viewer. However pdf are not in general editable so the answer to your question is probably "no" – David Carlisle Mar 10 '23 at 17:11

1 Answers1

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The question is rather unclear, but:

  • If you are looking for a kind of WYSIWYG LaTeX editor, see here.

  • If you mean edit the LaTeX source over an already made PDF, without having the source file (.tex), it is just impossible (the code is lost in the PDF).

  • Of course, there are many programs that allow edit a PDF made with LaTeX, or whatever (e.g., libreoffice, Word, and there are many online free editors too). These programs allow patch manually the output in some way, but AFAIK, at best basically you will editing a vectorial draw with many independent small text boxes. Of course, you are then limited to the very limited features of each editor, that hardly will include some LaTeX, capability as write maths with a true LaTeX format, being Inkscape (vectorial draw program) and Scribus (autoedition program) some of the exceptions, but in general, they maybe worth for some spot corrections (change one word for another of similar size, make it bold o cursive, and little more ) cover some part with a new box (a white box to erase some paragraph, for example) but they are a pain even for small edits as rewrite, move or add a single paragraph. Thus, IMHO, generally is a bad idea.

  • If you really and desperately need a large edit of a large text, said thesis.pdf, and you only have that PDF, the best that you can make is: (1) Export the pdf to plain text (thesis.pdf → thesis.txt) using pdftotext, for instance. (2) Rename thesis.txt to thesis.tex and edit it to add the LaTeX code to format the text. (3) To include the images, you can extract images from the PDF with some tools, take screenshots, or load directly thesis.pdf with \includegraphics using the options page, trim and clip. This maybe slow down the compilation but if the are vectorial draws, will be not pixelated, while saving the images a PNG or JPG files could mean some loss of quality.

Fran
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