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Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

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Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#141

Post by nip »

ornornor wrote: post #134
wolverine876 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For annotating and adding a hand drawn signature to PDFs, preview really is the best: lightweight, straightforward, free, comes with the OS. I don’t know any comparable app for Linux (or windows although I rarely use it)

https://simplePDF.eu will be the closest « Preview-like » experience on Linux (and any OS really).

It’s local only (the document you load and data you fill in never leave the browser) and free

Disclosure: I’m the developer behind it

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#142

Post by adrenvi »

ornornor wrote: post #133
mrfumier wrote: post #130

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.

A web app makes it cross platform. If you have a homelab, deploy it only once for every client. 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 yo…

Firefox now has some simple built-in PDF editing tools. Text and images can be added on top, but existing text can't be modified.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#143

Post by dpacmittal »

Ldorigo wrote: post #136

I'm surprised no one mentioned LibreOffice Draw - it doesn't always work perfectly (I guess it doesn't support some parts of the spec), but when it does, it's by far the most powerful pdf editor I found allowing to do things like move elements around, edit them (as in actually edit, not just annotate), etc. It's cross platform and FOSS. For page-level edits (rotating, reordering etc) pdftk in the cli (+ChatGPT to fin…

Yeah, libreoffice draw and inkscape are usually my go to tools for editing pdf.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#144

Post by gnyman »

buryat wrote: post #140
alex_suzuki wrote: post #137

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/

damn, that's a huge team https://smallpdf.com/about

I'm not surprised... I mean just the the specification for PDF 1.7 is what ~1300 pages ?

And then there is 2.0, and all the extensions [1]

And multiply that with the number of implementations.

If the goal is to make something that "always" works, you probably need a big team to keep up with the moving field of various bugs and reimplementations

[1] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0000...

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#145

Post by Moru »

bdd8f1df777b wrote: post #117
webel0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec as understood by the authors of the spec. There are ridiculous parts of the spec that allow support for things like JS, etc.

That is true, but I have never encountered a PDF that is not produced by me and cannot be faithfully represented in third party PDF readers. And I give up the idea of producing those kinds of PDFs because I know the people I send to will complain about me rather than their PDF readers. So, Adobe Acrobat doesn't have any monopoly power here, since almost no one cares about those things only they can do.

We often get PDF's that does not work in our pipeline and it's always blamed on the pipeline, not on the creating software. The user usually converts the PDF to an image with adobe reader and screenshot, load up Libreoffice, paste and export it as PDF archive.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#146

Post by fauigerzigerk »

wolverine876 wrote: post #102
pmarreck wrote: post #98

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.

"Best" isn't necessarily the same as "has the most features".

I think many people find that Preview.app does everything they ever wanted to do with PDFs. It really is surprisingly capable. It's also fast and far less convoluted than most PDF tools I have seen.

And of course it comes free with every Mac, which often makes it "best" in terms of value for money.

It doesn't help that many PDF editors (including the two you mentioned) are full of the most ridiculous pricing shenanigans.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#147

Post by kristiandupont »

mrfumier wrote: post #130

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.

Because it's a simple (for me as the user) and reliable way to get a UI without having to send my personal files to some server somewhere. What's the big deal?

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#148

Post by nirav72 »

Any recommendations for a desktop/cli PDF optimization tool that will reduce the size of a pdf? I've tried few and the best one so far is the one that is included in the subscription version of Adobe Acrobat. But I only need it occasionally and is not worth paying $20/month sub.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#149

Post by subtra3t »

ornornor wrote: post #133
mrfumier wrote: post #130

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.

A web app makes it cross platform. If you have a homelab, deploy it only once for every client. 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 yo…

I think edge would be perfect for you

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#150

Post by aidos »

nirav72 wrote: post #148

Any recommendations for a desktop/cli PDF optimization tool that will reduce the size of a pdf? I've tried few and the best one so far is the one that is included in the subscription version of Adobe Acrobat. But I only need it occasionally and is not worth paying $20/month sub.

Ghostscript maybe? Depends on what you’re doing but it can downsample images etc.
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