Viewing profile — gettalong

Zero-trust architecture is a bit of a misnomer: When you use a browser based tool you are always at risk that the data gets out. So indeed you have to trust the site you are using …

Why is it that everyone now duplicates/vibe-codes PDF tool websites? It seems that there is one new each week for about half a year now with none providing any outstanding features…

If it can only be viewed with your web application, it won't be useful for the general public.

PDF already has the notion of portable collections (PDF 2.0 section 12.3.5). As far as I can determine this is very similar to what you do except that your pdfx format won't be sup…

I usually use pdfpc ( https://pdfpc.github.io/ ) for this which works like a charm. No internet access needed, content stays on the computer.

Regarding "Important Notice on Third-Party Components": You are including AGPL components in your project which itself is AGPL. Even if you distribute your part of the code under t…

In case you don't know it: PyHanko provides a full and up-to-date implementation for digital signatures in PDF, including time stamping. https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/pyHank…

Yes, creating a binary and calling that would circumvent the AGPL. But then everything will be more complex and slower. Also, doing this extra work and developing the binary is pro…

I'm not a lawyer but I think you mistaken in this regard. One indication for this is that otherwise some major companies would have problems. For example, the GPL FAQ has the follo…

The library is dual-licensed as AGPL plus a commercial license. So everything is in the open and can be tested and tried out under the AGPL. Once the library is used in a commercia…

Thanks and corrected!

Thanks! I agree that laying out PDFs could be made easier by using a declarative mechanism instead of coding. However, I'm still not sure what the best way would be to do that. Usi…

You can get a long way with only implementing the most basic things of the PDF specification, like section 7. And even there you don't need everything. For example, there is no nee…

Many PDF viewers and library do not fully follow the PDF standard or have subtle bugs. This leads to problems later on. My guess is this all started many years ago when Adobe Reade…

Thanks - that helps!

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering. The only open source alternative I…

What are you using to generate the PDFs? Are you doing something like PrinceXML (or weasyprint) which directly convert HTML+CSS to PDF? Or are you converting HTML+CSS to something …

It may be a valid HTML and JPEG (didn't check) but it is definitely not a valid PDF file. For example, it is missing the version identifiers in the PDF header, there is no cross-re…

There is no reason to abandon PDF. As was already stated the main purpose of a PDF is viewing something as the author has intended, it should not be dynamic like a website. And edi…

It seems that the news hasn't spread far yet but due to sponsorships by various big PDF related companies the ISO standard for PDF 2.0 is freely available, see https://www.pdfa-inc…

If you need a state of the art CLI tool for signing PDFs that supports the latest standards (think ones from 2023), I can recommend pyHanko ( https://github.com/MatthiasValvekens/p…

So I uploaded one of my standard test files for compression and it actually expanded the file size from 52K to 93K while making the images blurry.

Fair point :) And yes, some PDFs use weird ways to represent the spacing between words.

So, I don't think that the first two parts, converting the PDF page to an image to get the text, is necessary. One could just use the basic information in a PDF content stream to g…

The content of a PDF file is not like the content of, say, an HTML or ODT file. With the latter you use plain text with formatting instructions and the application needs to do all …