On 7/27/25 8:55 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
Why do I ask?
In my read with PDF related questions, my responses were essentially "Why
are you trying to do?" rather than an answer to to a narrowly
focused question.
Sometimes the "Why" you might get in return is misguided
(e.g. paternalistic), but I think in the present case it's because
depending on what kind of editing you want to do, different tools need
to be used.
Multiple tools have mentioned. Reading the related manpages have
triggered possibly "what if ..." questions.
My PDF specific questions may have been rendered moot. As I said in my
initial post for this thread I have discovered the source documents used
in preparing the referenced PDF. They are spreadsheets and the data of
interest is already in specific columns.
A correct, but skew answer, could have been "to gain dietary information to
lower probability of another heart attack". Nutritionists had given me
answers that more a set of intermediary goals than actual things I could
apply to daily life.
Maybe it would be correct, but it would probably not help since the
issue is likely unrelated to the semantics of the PDF's contents but rather
to its shape (does it contain just text? tables? a scanned document?
diagram? ... what kind of "editing" do you plan to do on it? Add text?
Add annotations? Remove elements? ...).
Then again, maybe it would help because someone might point you to
a completely different document which contains just what you want.
As I just said above, I've discovered the source spreadsheets used by
the author(s) of the PDF.
But if so, it would be pure luck to bump into that info in a Debian
mailing-list.
But *THE* question remains.
How to ask narrowly focused questions which will get answers in this forum?
Try and avoid generic terms like "editing" (which doesn't convey much
more info than "changing")?
But if you knew what are the elements you need to put into the question,
you could probably find the answer via search engines. So embrace it
rather than fight it: telling you which kind of info we need to
answer your question, *is* a way to help you find the answer.
Stefan