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PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

macpep.org

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Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#61

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #14
wolfium3 wrote: post #9

I have a dream... that one day people will name their projects with names that don't exist on google yet. If you search for PEP now you'll find python enhancement proposals, and the "Philippine Entertainment Portal" and the stock code for PepsiCo.

I wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex, and include that number on any web page that they would like people searching for their project to find. That way once I know that say PEP the PDF editor exists and find its 128-bit number (let's say that is 379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73), at least I can subsequently toss a +379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc…

[deleted]

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#62

Post by narwally »

Gys wrote: post #3

Adding a roadmap with potential features would be nice. Otherwise one is actually asking for financing a personal pet project. A list of existing alternatives (incl MacOS Preview) could be added and an explanation why this project will be different (or ideally: better).

Isn't Preview limited to just annotations, or does it also do editing?

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#63

Post by aosaigh »

planb wrote: post #8

Hi, developer of a PDF scanning app for macOS (PDFScanner) here. I always toyed with the idea of developing a PDF engine from scratch but the spec scares me. Kudos for being that brave! Just curious: Why did you choose Objective-C for a new lib?

Aside: is there any way to demo PDFScanner? I literally got a Epson FF680W today and was shocked at how poor the default software is for reading documents. I tried VueScan (which everyone recommends online) but found the interface awful.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#64

Post by awinder »

strogonoff wrote: post #20

A GUI app for manually crafting PDFs is one thing, but a library instead would enable countless developers to create software capable of producing PDF deliverables as output, possibly improving the accessibility situation too. I would gladly sponsor the development of a reliable library that allows to programmatically produce compliant, accessible tagged PDFs with arbitrary layout[0], correctly printable and viewable…

How would your approach differ from something like RMarkdown or similar? Still trying to nail down the differentiation.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#65

Post by JKCalhoun »

narwally wrote: post #62
Gys wrote: post #3

Adding a roadmap with potential features would be nice. Otherwise one is actually asking for financing a personal pet project. A list of existing alternatives (incl MacOS Preview) could be added and an explanation why this project will be different (or ideally: better).

Isn't Preview limited to just annotations, or does it also do editing?

Aside from annotating, Preview can crop, reorder, rotate, delete, and insert pages in a PDF.

But at its core, it does not "non-destructively" edit the dictionaries and object graph of the original PDF. Instead, it replays the original PDF into a new PDF context.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#66

Post by mulmen »

kps wrote: post #50
vorpalhex wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a pretty solid idea. A meta tag for topics. Only issue would be handling inevitable "SEO-ified" abusers of it.

Simple solution: 379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73™

Not sure I follow. Are you saying that by trademarking the fingerprint you can prevent SEO abuse?

The problem with any SEO mitigation is that the 128 bit string is intended for SEO. If you make a cool new thing then I blog about it I want to use your 128 bit string and you want me to use it too! So how do you prevent someone else from putting it on a linkfarm? I don't think trademark helps there.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#67

Post by phonon »

strogonoff wrote: post #20

A GUI app for manually crafting PDFs is one thing, but a library instead would enable countless developers to create software capable of producing PDF deliverables as output, possibly improving the accessibility situation too. I would gladly sponsor the development of a reliable library that allows to programmatically produce compliant, accessible tagged PDFs with arbitrary layout[0], correctly printable and viewable…

https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ or anything TeX related...

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#68

Post by phonon »

strogonoff wrote: post #35
tkfu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with Prawn [1]? Perhaps I just haven't bumped up against its limitations yet, but in my experience it's exactly what you're asking for. Of course, it's in Ruby, which isn't to everyone's taste, but it's the best tool out there that I've found. [1] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

Prawn was considered and IIRC unfortunately it has very limited styling support. It looks like there are only commercial and quite expensive options for programmatic generation (Antenna House: XSL-FO, Prince: CSS). Apart from that, the one option that works appears to be Apache FOP. It’s built on Java and uses XSL-FO, which is somewhat limited and seemingly on the way to becoming outdated.

https://weasyprint.org/ is quite nice, though has limited header/footer support (for now).

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#69

Post by phonon »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #11

The one problem I consistently have with PDF forms on the Mac is an inability to change the font size in text fields. My work even pays for me to have the professional Adobe suite and that specific functionality doesn't exist. If someone could solve this problem I would probably give them some money.

What do you mean? In Acrobat Form (acroform) fields? In Acrobat Pro DC (in Windows, but assume Mac is the same), go into Prepare Form mode, select the field (or control select for multiple text fields), right click Properties, go to Appearance tab (Text section), and the either select Font Size: Auto (for autofit) or the point size you want.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#70

Post by runarberg »

strogonoff wrote: post #20

A GUI app for manually crafting PDFs is one thing, but a library instead would enable countless developers to create software capable of producing PDF deliverables as output, possibly improving the accessibility situation too. I would gladly sponsor the development of a reliable library that allows to programmatically produce compliant, accessible tagged PDFs with arbitrary layout[0], correctly printable and viewable…

Is it possible to use inkscape as a library? If not you can always use whatever library to produce an SVG and convert it to PDF. Or are there features in PDF that is impossible to produce using SVG?
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