pdf editing and saving

[Mike Love]

Hi,

I have a question about editing pdfs in GIMP (GIMP 2.8.18-Windows). Can I open up a multi-page pdf as a single document; edit some of the pages (I am whiting out text with Ink Tool), then re-save it as a single pdf again?

I have been opening a 36 page pdf by selecting: open-select all-open pages as images. This opens up each page separately. Then I have been saving each page as a separate file by choosing: file-export. Takes a long time.

Is there an easier way to do this, by opening the pdf as one doc maybe? Apologies in advance, I'm new to GIMP, and I'm not a computer guy.

Thanks!

Mike

[Ofnuts]

Gimp is definitely not the tool for this. What you save is not really a PDF (it won't scale), it's bitmaps images, one per page. Look at the file size before/after (a plain text PDF is about 20Kbytes/page, converted to bitmap it is several hundred kbytes per page).

A possible tool for this is LibreOffice writer. It loads PDFs (if they aren't locked or if you know the password). You can use the drawing tools to overlay rectangles over what you want to hide, and export the result as a true PDF (ie, no loss of quality).

[rich2005]

For documents that are true PDF with text and vectors then best not Gimp as previous, try LibreOffice Draw.

However, it might be that the document is a set of scanned pages that are just images anyway.

There is a plugin that will export a stack of Gimp layers to a multi-page PDF http://registry.gimp.org/node/27987 Read it and see what it says about a Windows installation.

1. You need the Windows version of ImageMagick installed  This is the standard installer
https://www.imagemagick.org/download/bin...64-dll.exe
note IM is command line so after installation do not expect anything click-n-wish to work

2. As-per the plugin directions, you need to edit the Gimp file default.env to add the imagemagick path. To save grief with the poor Windows tools, I include an edited version in the attached zip file. Use that to replace the existing C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\lib\gimp\2.0\environ\default.env

3. The ImageMagick (V7) syntax has changed since the plugin was written. A small change to the plug-in (convert becomes magick), so use the version in the zip file instead of the plugin-registry version. The file export-layers-to-pdf.py goes in your Gimp profile C:\Users\your-name\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins folder.

Tested in Win7 64 bit and Win10 64 bit VirtualMachines and working there.

[is_it_tennant]

Truth be told, answer provided by an administrator above here is absolutely correct - GIMP is not that thing you would rather use in order to make amends to PDF file. It would be like using Photoshop for the same purpose instead of Acrobat. Yes, Acrobat is a paid solution and pretty expensive as well, but there are lots of free and dead simple online tools, like this one eg https://ds11.pdffiller.com and other ones. It works the same way, but it doesn't separate every page, so you need to merge some dozens of one-page titles in the very one afterwards