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Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

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Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#91

Some feedback. Website design is poor. You could definitely do with a designer to make it look nicer. $5000ish a year is a weird price point. It's too expensive for a hobbyist or small dev shop, but too cheap for an enterprise to buy (when you consider the time of working on procurement problems you'll experience). You either need to make it cheap, like $200/yr, or much more expensive. Right now you are in no mans la…

Yes, as a startup you can't afford $375 per month.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#92

I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com . While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible. You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as…

Wow nice. I was just about to cancel my Photoshop subscription because 1) I hate subscription pricing models and 2) I'm using it mostly just to resize images. Nice to see that you have the Photoshop UI there so I don't have to relearn anything.

Why not use Preview? For most things, like resizing and cropping, and rotating, it just works

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow nice. I was just about to cancel my Photoshop subscription because 1) I hate subscription pricing models and 2) I'm using it mostly just to resize images. Nice to see that you have the Photoshop UI there so I don't have to relearn anything.

Why not use Preview? For most things, like resizing and cropping, and rotating, it just works

It doesn't do compression or format conversions.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow nice. I was just about to cancel my Photoshop subscription because 1) I hate subscription pricing models and 2) I'm using it mostly just to resize images. Nice to see that you have the Photoshop UI there so I don't have to relearn anything.

I understand a professional not wanting to learn a new UI for something as complex as graphics editing, but if you are admittedly mostly using it to resize images, I can't imagine why any other tool, including the infamous Gimp, would be so hard to "learn"?

I think I was overstating the extent to which I only use it for resizing photos.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#95

I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com . While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible. You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as…

Wow that's insane. It never would have even occurred to me to use Photopea for editing PDF's. But it does indeed import each element of the PDF as a separate layer, and you have PDF export with options to leave text as-is, rasterize text, or vectorize it. Two questions: 1) Does it set the resolution of the Photopea file, and the default resolution to re-export the PDF, to trying to detect the original resolution of i…

1) In a PDF file, the measure units are Inches. The page size is in inches. Any dimension is in Inches. There can be a bitmap having 200x200 pixels placed at 3x3 inches. Next to it can be a bitmap of 5x5 pixels placed at 5x5 inches.

That means, that PDF does not contain any DPI information. It is not needed at all. PDF rasterizer (e.g. a raster printer) can render it at any DPI. Photopea decodes and saves back bitmaps inside PDF in the original resolution. The rest is vector graphics.

2) For now, Photopea ignores embedded fonts. But it extracts the font name and in 98 % of cases, we already have the required font in our database of fonts, so we can render it identically.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#96

I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com . While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible. You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as…

dude.... this is insane

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#97

I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com . While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible. You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as…

Woah! Thanks for your amazing work. It never occurred to me either to use photopea for this and I use photopea for all kinds of other tasks.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use Preview? For most things, like resizing and cropping, and rotating, it just works

It doesn't do compression or format conversions.

It does do some format conversion and have some support for compression settings (if I understand you correctly). Under the File -> Export menu you can choose between some formats [0] and when applicable choose compression level, e.g for JPEG.

[0]: On my machine: HEIC, JPEG, JPEG-2000, OpenEXR, PDF, PNG, TIFF

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#100
Hi Nick,

Congrats on your launch. Just wanted to tell you that there's another service called PDF eXpress that's in use for IEEE conferences to make sure the authors conform to the given template. I know it's not exactly the same name, but might be worth looking into viz. copyright or trademarks.

More info on PDF eXpress: https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/pdfexpress.html

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