Hans Hagen wrote:

hm, so where does the required information about kerning, ligature building, hyphenation, contextual substitution, anchoring etc come from?

No idea, Hans; I simply use the tools that Adobe provide, and everything seems to work like magic.  A very great step forward from the days of Acrobat 7.

i presume we're anyway not talking of documents made by tex

Probably not (I would imagine that most originated in Word) but if you like to send me a sample of something (relatively small) created using LuaTeX, I will see to what extent I can edit it using AADC.


but forms use widgets and those are not really typeset

You know that, and Adobe know that, but the people who send out forms do not.  They send out bog-standard Word (or similar) documents with spaces for the respondent to write his (or her) answer, converted to Adobe PDF.  Not wishing to hand-write on such things, I instead use AADC to insert and/or modify text and images.  Even our national court service were happy to accept such a think as a part of a formal legal proceedings, with the "signature" (a jpeg from a scan) inserted using AADC.

imo editing a pdf makes no sense (and reflow even less) ... also, with respect to fonts, editing assumes all glyphs being present and with open type fonts one also enters a feature mess and gsub/gpos are not embedded

As I say, I have not looked into what happens internally; all I can say is "it works", in almost all cases where I have tried.


All I can say is that since using AADC, editing PDFs has become a real pleasure.
instead of fixing the source? (i'd probably opt for html then)

I have no source; I have a PDF, originated by a third party, which I need to amend (e.g., to illustrate what can be achieved or what is desired).  I have done this with wine lists, advertisements, posters, etc., sent them back to the originator, and he or she has then been able to incorporate the requested amendments in the original (Photoshop / InDesign / Illustrator / etc.) source.

but ... given this thread: we're talking of archiving and editing a scientific archived article is imo "not done'

Fine, that is a very different matter.

and ... for texies, if then make a pdf, they do have a source, so they can fix the source and regenerate the pdf (which also keeps them in sync)

Agreed.
** Phil.