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Topic: Manualy Editing PDF Files with a Text Editor
Conf: (P-PDF) General, Msg: 25884
From: aandi
Date: 8/17/2001 06:44 AM
You can prevent the "repair" message in several ways. It is caused because PDF is not designed for this; it has a cross reference table containing byte addresses, which you will damage. There is other damage too, especially to linearization tables. Also the stream Length will be wrong; this may prevent the file from being repaired in Acrobat 5.0.
At the very least you need to be familiar with the xref table idea and the Length of the stream, so you understand what you are breaking.
1. Never text edit a PDF (very, very strongly recommended).
2. Be sure to change text only to text that is EXACTLY the same length.
3. Manually correct all the xref tables in the file, and also fix the Length field (generally impractical, and impossible for optimized files).
4. Open the edited file in Acrobat and hope it repairs; then save the edited file.
