I've searched and found pstoedit makes a partial import of pdf to svg, and several other perl scripts and postscript programs that choke on some pdf content when converting to ai or ps even. What I was looking for was a method of rearranging print articles from current magazines for my own use with margins to make notes in, and with editing and condensing in mind. Is pstoedit, (the gpl part), the best there is now? Can ps2ai be made to not die so easily? Since pstoedit has the best error handling even though output is not just right, is anyone interested to take the source of it and add more?
Many pdfs are intended never to be editable, but often legitimate work is going to start with pdfs since adobe made them so popular by effective promotion and "free as in beer" viewers that worked. A big area of legitimate work is in catalogs whose typesetters are nowhere to be found, or not offering their editable layouts, or the layouts are made with ancient Mac SW that no one has anymore, and yet the paper catalog data needs to be mined for starting an online store web catalog.
See the inkscape wiki under tutorial ideas for a couple of new images related to pstoedit -f plot-svg
John Griessen