[pdftex] How to covert pdf file into latex file?

[Victor Ivrii]

On 7/13/06, jonathan d p ferguson <jdpf at sunforge.com> wrote:
> On Jul 12, 2006, at 7:36 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>
> >>>>>> "John" == John R Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> writes:
> >
> >> And I know of no one who has even attempted this kind of reverse
> >> engineering on a pdf file.
> >
> > Why do you want to reverse engineer anything while it is very well
> > documented?
> >
>
> AFAIK, while the PDF standard is well documented, in order to turn it
> back into a source format, one would need to know first the stream-
> markup of an InDesign, Quark, Illustrator, or pdfeTeX file, and
> second, the source format codes explicitly stored in the PDF. For
> example, when one saves an Illustrator file as PDF, one can check
> "Preserve Illustrator editing capability" for the PDF file. Doing so
> encapsulates the Illustrator file in the PDF file as a stream (or set
> of streams).


pdf can encapsulate anything: using commenting tools in Acrobat or
attachfile package in LaTeX. However it would be not much different
from distributiong of the source code together with pdf. Furthermore
nobody does the former.

Illustrator can easily open and edit pdf files without such option
(even generating by something very different). However it is
completely different case.

OT: My own experience in converting MSW files to latex is that one
should extract only text and redo everything else (equations, graphics
[which is supposed to be vector graphics] and even formatting since
the original formatting is usually insane)
-- 
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Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto