At present time the market of different solutions centralized around PDF format is growing. If you do not stay apart of the process and work in this field you might often faced further problems:
Being a software developer you can’t diagnose the problem in your application quickly, because you know nothing exactly about inner content of its PDF output. Standard tools like Acrobat allow you to see only rendered document, while you need to see how it looks like inside!
Being a PDF document author you also experience problems with getting full information about each object you see in a document.
Being newbie to PDF solutions and studding PDF specification you can’t get a sharp picture of how all this COS objects stuff works in a resulting document.
So what is the solution? We recommend you to use PDF Surgeon! In skilful hands this instrument becomes a great help for software developer of any level who works on PDF-related software. Let’s see what features it provides.
Surgeon is an Acrobat plug-in. It is easy to install and use, after installation set of appropriate controls is accessible right on Acrobat toolbar.
You can display whole document structure and navigate to the object of your interest with just a few clicks. Structure is displayed in a convenient tree browser. Each tree node is provided with an icon indicating its type. You can quickly introspect a content of the selected object and view its properties. Special magnification tool allows you to select any object (cross reference, image, annotation, etc.) you see in Acrobat window and immediately open it in PDF Surgeon.
You can modify any properties of the selected COS object and save results.
You can create new COS objects, delete, copy, cut and paste existing object! Stream objects can be edited in HEX editor and can be exported to external file.