# Using the Oracle “Import PDF” Extension in Open Office Draw to Edit pdf Files



## redynstruc (Aug 3, 2008)

I am a fairly new Mac user with OS X 10.6. For several months, I have been trying to find something which would edit pdf files better than Preview does (for example, the content of a text box in Preview can only be "center aligned"). Skim and FormulatePro were two options I tried that were improvements over Preview in many respects, but wouldn't let me paste an image onto my pdf (such as, for example, if I wanted to put my digital signature on a document).

Then, I "discovered" the Oracle PDF Import Extension which I had installed in Open Office months ago, but hadn't really used. By "discovered," I mean I read on somebody's blog that you could use Open Office Draw to edit pdf files and I thought, "Hey, I wonder if that would work with my setup." (Boy, do I feel stupid.) 

I have just started using this functionality, but in just an hour or so of playing around, I have found that it has far exceeded my expectations and, even, my immediate needs. Besides giving you (a) all the control over text and text boxes that you would expect from, say, a word processing program and (b) allowing you to paste images onto your pdf, Open Office Draw also includes layers! 

The layer function threw me off for a bit, because, at first, I kept finding that my attempts to edit the document resulted in grabbing the raster image and moving it "off" of the underlying text layer (a function, I will admit, that I think will be worth exploiting someday, but wasn't what I was looking for at the moment). Then, I discovered that you can "lock" the layer so as to prevent this annoying occurrence. To create your edits, simply create a new layer (call it "MyEdits" or whatever you want) and you're in business.

Anybody who has done anything more than drawn a couple of lines and boxes on a page has discovered that editing the overlapping objects can be a real pain - if not an outright impossibility. Separating these overlapping objects through the use of different layers solves the problem.

The only downside to the use of Open Office Draw as a pdf editing tool that I can see is that you must import the pdf, save your edits in odg format, and then export it to pdf when you're done. I know that we would all like to have the capability of doing everything I just described directly to the native document, but, hey, for all the functionality I have been searching the internet for weeks to find, I think it's a reasonable trade off.


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