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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

#171

Post by chaps »

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.

"does the job perfectly"

Um. I work with PDFs a LOT and.. nah PDFtk is pretty weak. It doesn't even do OCR!

This looks like a wonderful tool that solves a lot of problems that existing tools don't typically put together. It's an achievement, and your post is unnecessarily crass.

This is very much the sort of tool that you host internally at a newsroom so journalists don't have to wrangle with software or write code. Like, in that situation, who cares if it's on top of docker? The users definitely won't give a shit.

Please consider that you're not the target audience....

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

#172

Post by izacus »

simondotau wrote: post #121
Alifatisk wrote: post #61

It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.

PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. The reality is that PDF is open, reliable, useful, feature rich, and widely accepted. It has no serious competitors. There's a reason why, unlike raster image formats, there aren't any serious competitors. The thing to realise about printed page file formats is that even if you set aside all of the silly "multimedia" a…

Especially since there's a PDF/A standard subset for archival, which makes those documents readable decades after any other format would rot.

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

#173

Post by izacus »

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.

> 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.

That's because PDF is well designed and has a fallback for advanced page elements so more primitive readers can still render them.

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

#174

Post by kergonath »

pmarreck wrote: post #98
Alifatisk wrote: post #61

It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.

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)

> perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript natively?

And OS X and its successors use Display PDF natively, which is why it is trivial to save almost anything that can be displayed into a PDF file. The PDF stack that Preview.app leverages is a foundation of the OS itself.

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

#175

Post by izacus »

pmarreck wrote: post #98
Alifatisk wrote: post #61

It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.

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)

What a bizarre comment - Preview.app isn't even the best PDF software on Apple platforms (it's more likely something like Readdle's PDF Expert).

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

#176

Post by ikurei »

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.

It may not be right for you, but I can see situations where this would be preferable.

If because of your job you find yourself doing these operations very often, and the ability to do them from several devices with different OSes is valuable, it might be great to throw this on a server.

Or if your work has several people, may be not very technical folks, do them often. I’ve worked in a couple of places where this could’ve come in handy.

Also, it includes an API. Also, being open source, if in the future you’re creating a web app that needs some of these features, you could learn from/copy from its code.

I think this is a good contribution to the world.

> I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.

I partially share this concern. I wouldn’t deploy this for myself unless I had a very easy way to stop it and start it, but anyway while not in use it it should only be consuming a bit of RAM, and there’s plenty of very efficient hardware suitable for small servers these days.

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

#177

Post by mijoharas »

nirav72 wrote: post #163
aidos wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this is probably a good starting point: ghostscript -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf From this gist https://gist.github.com/guifromrio/6390547#

Very helpful tip. Thank you! - Ran it through GS and I got 30% reduction in a 50mb pdf file. I think if I play around with some options - such as converting images to grayscale, I might be able to reduce it by another 10-20%.

I guess it depends on your document, but I'm surprised you only get that much compression. For scanned to pdf documents I often get orders of magnitude.

I'm not at my computer, but try messing with the `/printer` in the above command, there are other options, (possibly `/ebook`?) that control the compression ratio from memory.

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

#178

Post by Alifatisk »

whatisyour wrote: post #105
Alifatisk wrote: post #61

It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.

What about Okular?

There is no support for redacting text properly on Okular.

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

#179

Post by Alifatisk »

rmbyrro wrote: post #96
Alifatisk wrote: post #61

It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.

Foxit Phantom is pretty good

It costs, I might aswell pay for Acrobat.

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

#180

Post by Alifatisk »

izacus wrote: post #175
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)

What a bizarre comment - Preview.app isn't even the best PDF software on Apple platforms (it's more likely something like Readdle's PDF Expert).

There are of course better softwares than the Preview.app, but that's if you are willing to pay for it. Preview.app is free.
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