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Re:Horrifying PDF Experiments by kilburn on Saturday January 02, 2021 @08:54AM (#25612836)
I cannot recommend qpdf [1] enough if you want to play around with PDFs.

Aside from being an excellent pdf manipulation library it also has a mode where it outputs a version of the pdf that is much easier to manipulate with a text editor and then lets you build a new pdf from that.

Shout out to Jay who has been steadily working on it for many many years. He is the most kind, undestanding and hard working free software developer I've had the pleasure to cross paths with. Thanks for all your hard work Jay!

[1] https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf

Re:Horrifying PDF Experiments by koheripbal on Sunday January 03, 2021 @10:33AM (#25622299)
I don't see an ability to view PDF version history in this tool. Am I missing something?
Re:Horrifying PDF Experiments by tonyedgecombe on Monday January 04, 2021 @03:11AM (#25628798)
From the docs:

QPDF is not a PDF content creation library, a PDF viewer, or a program capable of converting PDF into other formats.

Re:Horrifying PDF Experiments by koheripbal on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @09:57AM (#25646149)
But doesn't being able to see all streams mean that I can see edited/erased content from prior states of the document?
Re:Horrifying PDF Experiments by jbn on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @02:13PM (#25649646)
not necessarily, there's nothing that says that old content is preserved in inaccessible streams... the entire PDF file can be re-written discarding all old content.