Adobe design

[Carlis]

Hi
I need some software to edit PDF for publishing. Essentially; matlab spits out a pdf. I want to crop it, edit, add some text boxes, perhaps draw a little on top and stitch a few such things together into a panel. I want to work with PDF or other vector based format so that I don't lose quality. Would indesign and illustrator do it for me?

 

[TheStu]

Honestly, Preview might do it for you, try that first.

 

[Kmax82]

Honestly, Preview might do it for you, try that first.

This.

If you find you still can't do what you need (but I believe Preview does everything you've mentioned).. then maybe check out PDFPen by SmileOnMyMac.

http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/

 

[rivan]

Hi
I need some software to edit PDF for publishing. Essentially; matlab spits out a pdf. I want to crop it, edit, add some text boxes, perhaps draw a little on top and stitch a few such things together into a panel. I want to work with PDF or other vector based format so that I don't lose quality. Would indesign and illustrator do it for me?

Preview won't allow you much editing freedom and I'm skeptical of PDFpen (but will admit I haven't used it).

That said, Illustrator will allow you to open the PDFs and edit them with complete freedom. Indesign will allow you to place and crop them, and allow you to draw on top of them.

If those applications are outside your budget (or are just overkill), there are a number of freeware apps that support vector drawing - I've heard good things about Inkscape over the years as an 'Illustrator lite', and similarly Scribus as an 'InDesign lite'.

A quick browse shows Inkscape using the SVG format, so it may not open PDFs, but I'd think Matlab could output an SVG?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you have Illustrator and InDesign, you probably also have Acrobat Professional, which will also do everything you've mentioned.