replacement for Acrobat Professional?

[Kevin Kinsey]

Michael W. Lucas wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 11:59:35PM -0600, Kevin Kinsey wrote:
>  
>
>>It's up to Michael, though, to tell us how well it works, I suppose.  No
>>package in packages-6-current/Latest, so I'm building from src, and
>>headed for bed before it gets done I imagine.
>>    
>>
>
>So, for posterity...
>
>I'd rate pdftops and flpsed as 95% of the way there for this audience.
>Some small things don't work, particularly "layered" elements.  Some
>parts of the manuscript I was given were highlighted, for example.  In
>the original the highlighting is transparent, while the pdftops/flpsed
>combination the highlighting obliterates the underlying text.  There
>are other, very minor variations.
>
>That last 5% might not be critical for most people; I would certainly
>use it for preparing personal documents, or even documents within my
>company.  But OpenOffice's PDF export is far easier for preparing PDFs
>in general.
>
>for this application, pdftops/flpsed is not acceptable.  When you dump
>a PDF directly to a web press and produce a book from it, tiny
>variations in page placement or layout will result in a really useless
>print run.  But from the various tools people have suggested and that
>I've tried last night and this morning, it's as good as we have.
>  
>

It certainly doesn't seem as "full-featured" as some commercial
products (ref. subject line), and my short testing concurs with
yours.

I had some trouble with "image handling" --- I imagine that this
is similar to the "layered elements" you mention; I have no great
wealth of personal knowledge of the PDF format, though.

The author's homepage states that flpsed is still alpha-quality
software.  I'd say it looks rather promising for the future, perhaps;
we can hope so, and do what we can to support it.

KDK

-- 
"God doesn't play dice." --- Albert Einstein