: Edit a PDF while preserving quality I have a PDF file I need to cut some parts out of for a presentation. I tried doing this with GIMP and saving the result as a PDF. However when I zoom
I have a PDF file I need to cut some parts out of for a presentation. I tried doing this with GIMP and saving the result as a PDF.
However when I zoom in on the result, the quality is bad, even though the file format is correct, the output doesn't have the quality I expect from a PDF.
At the moment my solution is the following: when I import the pdf file in GIMP I set a very high quality, but I don't like this solution. It seems "naive" to me. I hope that you understand my question, I can't explain myself very well in this context.
*I am not an expert of graphics, I don't know the right terminology but what I mean here is that when you zoom in on a PDF file the quality is preserved. You can zoom it how much as you want and this is the thing that I want to preserve.
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I have dealt with this in many different ways. One that is easy and works in many situations is to take a screen shot of the part of the PDF that you need, at a high zoom level. Then, edit the resulting raster image. Because you zoom in to the PDF first, you create a large image that can be scaled, and will still have sufficient resolution for it to be zoomed itself. The only limitation is the size of your monitor, because most ways of capturing screen shots only let you capture one monitor's worth. However, again, if you are good with image editing, you can zoom into your PDF, capture it as more than one image (scroll to the parts you need), and then stitch the multiple images together. For anything but a photograph, this isn't that hard. Also, some screen capture programs actually do capture more than one screenfull -- see "ShareX" which is free and allows scrolling captures.
GIMP is a raster image editor - so, if you import a PDF you'll get a raster image, and raster images are made of pixels. Obviously if you import it at a high resolution the quality will be good, but not if you zoom in. When you zoom in on raster images you will see the pixels.
It is often possible to cut up a PDF using vector image editing software, such as Adobe Illustrator (not free), or Inkscape (free). Both can open PDFs. Vector images are rescalable - so you can zoom in without seeing any pixels.
Note: PDF images can contain both vector and raster elements.
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