: Re: What's the correct way for developers to edit PDF? Recently I got a task to manually add a Table of Contents to a PDF ebook generated by someone who left it out. I didn't know how to do

@Melissa

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Answering the more general questions, there are three basic kinds of editing.

Add, remove or rearrange pages

Use software like PDFtk which can do all of this.
Add content to existing pages

You can use LaTeX to draw anything on PDF pages. Basically, you can use the existing PDF and background and all your LaTeX on top; see e.g. here.

If LaTeX is too much of a roadblock (meaning, you don't know it yet), using Inkscape may work nicely (see below).
Change content on existing pages

That's the hardest one. You can use software like PDFEdit to make changes, but as long as you don't use Adobe's expensive tools, things are going to be nasty (or so I hear).

You can use Inkscape to convert individual pages to SVG, edit and reconvert to PDF (cf 1.). This has limitations, though.

For your example of adding a table of contents, let me recommend the following approach. Stop whenever you have the result.

Get the sources, add the ToC there, and reconvert to PDF.
Get the ToC pages (as PDF) and insert them (see above).
Write your own ToC with any tool, laboriously matching the original documents formatting, and insert it (see above).

Since all but the first alternative will break page numbering and the third will (most likely) break formatting, it's clear what the best alternative is.

Tell your client to start using LaTeX.

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