scott wrote:

> I always thought of PDFs as the digital version of print-outs.

They are. Except that unlike a PostScript page description (which is an 
unstructured arbitrary Turing-complete program which may or may not 
produce an image as a side-effect of its execution), a PDF file contains 
sufficient metadata to be easily manipulatable. (E.g., it's not 
Turing-complete, it's easy to locate a specific page, it has a bounding 
box included, etc.)

> Think 
> what you would do if someone gave you two printed out sheets and asked 
> the above...

Yeah, well, if digital printouts have only the same functionality as 
real printouts, then they're rather pointless. We may as well just use 


> BTW, you might be able to find some software that renders a PDF to an 
> image file, then use some paint program to do what you want.

Both Ghostscript and Acrobat will happily transform PDF into a bitmap 
image. (Though Acrobat will only produce Windows Bitmap - the most 
braindead image format in widespread use.)

The trouble is, then the pages would be bitmap images. That means that I 
can manipulate then with IrfanView. On the other hand, it means they'll 
either be vastly lower resolution than the original vector graphics, or 
they'll be absolutely huge files...

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