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PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

macpep.org

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#101
post #14
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…

That's actually a pretty good idea. Kind of like an official @mention/#hashtag for an exact topic, if somehow wasn't abused by people, would definitely improve related search results. Navigating user intent algorithms is getting more difficult.

Does schema.org etc support ids beyond keywords/categories? I guess the id could just be a keyword.

Maybe a public registry where you claim an id for a topic, similar to claiming a yelp page or an ISBN number. Then anyone posting related content includes that id. Popular topics could be grouped. You could generate memorable ids for most known topics/products/etc, and people just utilize them organically, robots could apply them automatically over time also.

It's especially bad for words with many definitions, like "bridge repair", could mean a dental bridge, guitar bridge, or a bridge over a lake.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#102
post #14
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…

Just added one to a project of mine[0] (just a YouTube browser using the RSS thing YouTube does). Hope it catches on!

[0] - https://github.com/devenblake/ytfeed.py

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#104
post #63
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.

Aaah, trial versions on the App Store :( I'm still not sure what would be the best way to implement a demo version for an App Store only app - I loathe the "Free with IAP" model. If you want to test if your scanner works with PDFScanner, try to use it with the Image Capture application that comes with macOS. It uses the same library as PDFScanner to talk to the scanner, so if your scanner works there, it will also work in PDFScanner.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#105
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex We already have something similar: URLs.

tzs is proposing URNs rather than textual program names. A URL is unnecessarily specific (though I suppose you could anycast URL resolution)

> RFC 4122 defines a Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace for UUIDs. A UUID presented as a URN appears as follows:[1]

> > urn:uuid:123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...

Version 4 UUIDs have 122 random bits (out of 128 bits total).

In Python:

  >>> import uuid
  >>> _id = uuid.uuid4()
  >>> _id.urn
  'urn:uuid:4c466878-a81b-4f22-a112-c704655fa4ee'
Whether search engines will consider a URL or a URN or a random str without dashes to be one searchable-for token is pretty ironic in terms of extracting relations between resources in a Linked Data hypergraph.

  >>> _id.hex
  '4c466878a81b4f22a112c704655fa4ee'
The relation between a resource and a Thing with a URI/URN/URL can be expressed with https://schema.org/about . In JSON-LD ("JSONLD"):

  {"@context": "https://schema.org",
   "@type": "WebPage",
   "about": {
     "@type": "SoftwareApplication",
     "identifier": "urn:uuid:4c466878-a81b-4f22-a112-c704655fa4ee",
     "url": ["", ""],
     "name": [
       "a schema.org/SoftwareApplication 
Or with RDFa:

  
    
      
      
      
      a schema.org/SoftwareApplication < CreativeWork < Thing
      a rose by any other name
    
  
Or with Microdata:

  
    
    
      
      
      
      
      
    
  

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#106
post #55

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…

Guess, you could use PsPDFKit ( https://pspdfkit.com ) but that costs money but you don't have to deal with all the weirdness of PDF

I should take a deeper look, but at first glance most of its features seem to revolve around working with already existing documents—viewing, annotating, searching, signing, filling out forms.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#107

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?

Well, generally it is possible to produce a PDF where each page is one big vector (or even one big raster image for that matter). It would visually look the same as the one created from separate objects and text, but from my understanding with this approach it would be tricky or impossible to create a properly tagged accessible PDF.

That aside, using Inkscape for parts of the doc looked like an interesting idea. I checked and unfortunately the API seems limited. There is a Python plugin system but I don’t think it is possible to create a solution that works entirely headless on CI boxes without having to invoke Inkscape GUI.

Re: PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac

#110
post #81

The PDF file format specification has 971 pages. https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html

Just create a simple PDF example by using TextEdit's export function, and open the PDF with a plain text editor, you should be easy to figure out what's going on in PDF.
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