Hi there,
Pardon my ignorance regarding editing PDFs. I’m wondering how much a captured PDF can be edited, if at all. By captured I mean, a webpage saved as PDF or captured using DEVONthink as PDF. For instance, let say that I captured the screenshot below as a PDF, and I wanted to remove the Advanced Search field and the “PDF app for Windows” posting in the middle of the page. Is that at all possible, and if so, which would you consider to be the best Mac app to facilitate that?
Cheers
It depends on what the results you want after removing the things you mentioned. Most PDF editors will let you turn those areas in to blank space either by covering them or removing the content in those locations, but I don’t know of any that will then reposition the remaining content to make it look there was nothing in those locations.
With a PDF of that image, you could use the area selection tool in Preview to select the left portion of the image, excluding the “Advanced Search” area, and “crop” the document. The “Advanced Search” area would stop being visible. It’s actually retained in the file, though.
Cropping a selection out of the center is however very tricky, since cropping in Preview and most PDF editing software is basically retaining a view of one area and excluding the rest of the image from view. So. you can have one cropping rectangle in the software – to crop out the middle of the page you would need two cropping rectangles. Not possible in Preview, not possible in PDF Expert and others I know about.
So, I could break the original document up into multiple sections via cropping. Could I then join those cropped sections into a new PDF via Import?
Is there a reason you need to work with PDFs? What you’re really have is a problem that involves compositing images. I would use a simple screen grab app, like ScreenFloat, copy the pieces that I want to composite, then reassemble them on a canvas – like on a blank Word or Pages document. From there I can print the composite back out as a PDF.
