Need to Edit Those Scanned (.pdf) Job Application Forums

Hi All,

Well, like everywhere - times are tough in Phoenix, Arizona.

I’ve started to collect job applications, and got my old H-P ScanJet 4300C scanner going again to scan to .pdf job applications forms.

Filling job application forms in by hand seem really stupid in this day and age, plus I’ve been using Linux for about 6 - 7 years now. Hey, the scanner that I have was given to me by a M$ user who could not get it to work under M$. LOL!

I’ve tried to edit using GIMP, but the output file is not .pdf. The best there is .jpeg, or .gif. And those files are huge!

I’ve got PDF Editor installed, but it doesn’t seem to allow me to just add the necessary information that I need to do.

I’m talking about simple forms here - job applications - where I can add the needed information from a scanned document that I turned into a .pdf.

I’ve also tried the OpenOffice 3.0 extension from Sun, but that will not install. It is still a beta.

I’ve tried a few other things, but the idea is - open a scanned .pdf, add text, save it, and away it goes!

BTW, I’m running openSuSE 11.0.

Help!

Problem is a scanned PDF is not a PDF form. It’s just a bitmap in a fancy container.

So you’d have to add the text using a graphics editor like gimp and then write it out as say Postscript which can easily be converted to PDF. It’ll still be a bitmap and still huge.

So you’d have to add the text using a graphics editor like gimp and then write it out as say Postscript which can easily be converted to PDF. It’ll still be a bitmap and still huge.

ken_yap,

I’ve been working with GIMP, but don’t understand Postscript.

Basically, I can edit a .pdf (add the necessary personal information) to fill out an application, but saving it to a .pdf seems to be the problem.

There has to be a more eloquent Linux solution.

Postscript is just a printer language and easily converted to PDF using say ps2pdf. If you can generate Postscript from gimp, that’s a start.

If you can generate Postscript from gimp, that’s a start.

ken_yap,

I can save an edited .pdf with GIMP to .ps. I went to the ps2pdf Web Site, and found this is a web based service. There I read about Ghostscript then downloaded all the packages in the repositories.However, there does not seem to be an option to save the opened files to .pdf. Hmm…

Any other ideas?

ps2pdf is a CLI program and comes from the ghostscript-library package

$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/ps2pdf
ghostscript-library-8.62-17.1

ps2pdf is a CLI program and comes from the ghostscript-library package

ken_yap,

I have been through my file directory and have found ps2pdf is installed. But, can not launch it as an application.

BTW, thanks for the posts!

Open up a terminal window, cd to the directory where your PS files are and do:

ps2pdf something.ps

This will leave the output in something.pdf

ken_yap,

In terminal I get this:

jjxxxxx@linux-pbzd:~> cd /home/jjxxxxx/S4P1of4.ps
bash: cd: /home/jjxxxxx/S4P1of4.ps: Not a directory
jjxxxxx@linux-pbzd:~>

cd /home/jjxxxxx
ps2pdf S4P1of4.ps

ken_yap,

*You are a master!*That worked!

Thanks again for all the posts.