Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Open Office will not correctly open a PDF to edit.

I search on the forum, "pdf not working"

The search feature insists this means "+pdf -working"

So I cannot edit my CV this morning. When last I used Open Office, I could edit a PDF.

When last I used openoffice.org I could search the forum with terms I selected myself.

How can you not know that the new search settings are breaking the search? Are you doing this on purpose? I find it as hard to believe that nobody has yet noticed the breaking of the search function as I do to believe that nobody in all these years has made a post called "pdf not working".

What makes you think that OpenOffice should be able do that? OpenOffice can't edit your paper print neither. PDF is a mere output format, a virtual print out. You open your original documents for editing and then create another PDF from that. If you keep the PDF print and throw away the original document, you have no editable document anymore. Software to edit PDF is rare and expensive. There is an extension to OpenOffice which is able to translate a PDF into a Draw document but this is more a proof of concept, good enough to fix typos and small portions of text.

The question on PDF edition has been well covered by Villeroy.

So for the search feature, what about adding a "+" sign before the "not" so that it gives this query: +pdf +not +working?
But even with that, it's not really an intelligent query.
This one: [rel=search.php?keywords=pdf+"not+working"&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=topics&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search]pdf "not working"[/rel] may be slightly better.
But the real question is not that it's not working, you actually want to edit a PDF.
A PDF that is not working is a PDF that does not display.

So before putting the shame on search features that are standard since years not only in forums, please try to use the feature that allows you to be labelled as an intelligent being (that is the brain).

See [Tutorial] How do I view or edit a PDF file with OpenOffice?

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

This topic is about the search function, not about PDF.

Apparently, the search function interprets "PDF not working" incorrectly, as if you want to find all posts with "PDF" but without "working", and therefore substitutes - for "and". Cool. I never came across that, but it's good to keep in mind.

So, you cannot edit your CV. That's odd. You wrote your CV with, I suppose, a word processor, most likely Writer, exported it to PDF, and now you complain that you can't edit it in OpenOffice. Well, you don't edit a printout, do you? You edit the original document, saved in the odt format. What, you didn't save the original file? Uh oh.

floris v wrote:This topic is about the search function ...

I think schools now need to teach pupils how to craft an appropriate search argument to find what they are looking for.

Few people bother to read about the qualifiers (+, -, "xy xyz", site:abc.com etc) which are so useful. NOT is a valid logical command, equal to -, so unless you know how to work around it (with "not working" as Hagar suggests) you are stuck. Interestingly +not forces the not whereas logically they cancel.

A bad workman always blames his tools.

Always store your important documents in the international standard ODF file formats. It is the native fileformat of the Apache OpenOffice and the LibreOffice, and the MS Office can read this file format.

Do not confuse ODF and PDF file formats! Only the abbreviation of the name is similar...

The PDF file format was designed (By the Adobe) to be able to read and print a document with the same look and feel in various environment, but NOT for reediting it.



You can do some cosmetics on the (smaller) PDF files by usage the AOO Draw application with a special Extension: "Pdf Import". The LibreOffice has this feature by default. Note: it is NOT a full editing feature.

John_Ha wrote:

floris v wrote:This topic is about the search function ...

I think schools now need to teach pupils how to craft an appropriate search argument to find what they are looking for.

Few people bother to read about the qualifiers (+, -, "xy xyz", site:abc.com etc) which are so useful. NOT is a valid logical command, equal to -, so unless you know how to work around it (with "not working" as Hagar suggests) you are stuck. Interestingly +not forces the not whereas logically they cancel.

A bad workman always blames his tools.

Actually, after thinking this over, we should have suggested that the OP uses another search pattern. He wants to find a way to edit a PDF. So, searching for "Open PDF file" would be better. Why search for topics where the subject is that PDF doesn't work in OO when you want to learn how to get it to work?

As I said in my reply, the question and the keywords should have been "edit pdf". IMHO.

Hagar Delest wrote:The question on PDF edition has been well covered by Villeroy.

So for the search feature, what about adding a "+" sign before the "not" so that it gives this query: +pdf +not +working?
But even with that, it's not really an intelligent query.
This one: [rel=search.php?keywords=pdf+"not+working"&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=topics&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search]pdf "not working"[/rel] may be slightly better.
But the real question is not that it's not working, you actually want to edit a PDF.
A PDF that is not working is a PDF that does not display.

So before putting the shame on search features that are standard since years not only in forums, please try to use the feature that allows you to be labelled as an intelligent being (that is the brain).

Hey, quibbling that you prefer an item to be utterly broken before you consider it "not working" does nothing to address the situation that the search did not accept my search terms.

There is NO circumstance where you should not accept search terms, except where you are not going to perform a search.

Someone said below it seems like the engine has misinterpreted "not" as a command. Well making "not" into a command is as difficult as making "it" or "the" or "or"... You have to add a character, like "not=searchterm" or "not+searchterm". And then, if it is totally different to ho3 most other searches work, you have to add instructions right where we can see them.

And lastly, about the nature of PDF. A PDF is not a paper or a printout or anything like that and talking about it like it is doesn't help people who have come here because they don't know stuff. You could have said that Adobe is locking the format up, and that would make sense. Saying, what you think this is a paper printer? Only makes me go, what? Nobody said anything about paper or print, even paper or print they didn't know was paper or print. It isn't. It is a "portable document". An electronic file. An abstract form of matter. You know well, what you can do with paper in a printer is nothing to do with what you can do with editing PDF in a word processing app.

It's not really going to affect me after this but I do appreciate the OO app so I am trying to be critical of the responses which have said, "Problem? What problem? I don't have a problem..?" I wasn't searching to see if you had a problem or not. I was searching to see if I could fix mine, and I did eventually, but this search here still did not accept my search terms. Best of luck

sureis wrote:Someone said [below] it seems like the engine has misinterpreted "not" as a command. Well making "not" into a command is as difficult as making "it" or "the" or "or"...

If you are going to quote me then read what I actually wrote, try to understand it, and quote me correctly. I did not say the "engine has misinterpreted "not" as a command". I said precisely the opposite, namely

... NOT is a valid logical command, equal to - ...

You are obviously ignorant of basic logical expressions (AND, OR, NOT, NOR, NAND, XOR etc) and you know nothing of the use of double quotes in search engines to force what you want.

Stop complaining about the tools and start looking at the workman not knowing simple basics about how to use them.