131–140 of 240 posts
But... why? WHY?? Why would I run a docker container, a webserver, start a browser, navigate webpages... just to do some operations on a pdf locally? A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk ( https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ ) does the job perfectly. I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.
But... why? WHY?? Why would I run a docker container, a webserver, start a browser, navigate webpages... just to do some operations on a pdf locally? A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk ( https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ ) does the job perfectly. I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.
And PDFtk doesn’t do annotations afaik which is a huge pain point on Linux (at least for me) because there are no applications that I know of to easily do things that are trivial on OSX like adding text or hand drawn signatures to PDFs. Masterpdf can do it but with a watermark and some limitations.
Maybe it doesn’t suit your particular use case but I wouldn’t say pdftk can replace this project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s incredible to me that not only has Preview.app been the best non-Adobe way to use PDF’s for decades now and only on macOS (perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript natively?) but that Linux actually also seems to have better tooling in this space than Windows (where you’re pretty much stuck with Adobe Reader if you want a free solution)
> Preview.app been the best non-Adobe way to use PDF’s for decades now Where is all this stuff coming from? Why would you say Preview is the best? Foxit? Nitro? Their are endless PDF applications much more powerful and capable, some designed for professionals.
How easy or difficult would it be to turn this into an electron app so that non-technical users can use it easily too?
Better use existing applications like PDFsam [0] or PDF-XChange [1]. [0] https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/ [1] https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/
For page-level edits (rotating, reordering etc) pdftk in the cli (+ChatGPT to find the right incantations) works very well.
What I have mainly have been looking for in the free software ecosystem is a good tool to work with PDF tagging/structure/element attributes. At work I really have only been able to do the work I need on random PDFs with Adobe Acrobat. It seems strange that this is the case as PDF is now an open standard.
Have you considered making serverless/browser-only version?
Smallpdf [1] probably deserves a mention here. Not OSS and not self-hosted, but I‘ve used it occasionally and it has always worked really well. When I was running an agency, we inherited their first office – very cool folks. [1] https://smallpdf.com/