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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

#121

Post by simondotau »

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" and "interactivity" features, there's still a gargantuan rabbit hole of non-trivial features that need to be implemented absolutely perfectly, from kerning to spot color. PDF does it all very well. There's really no scope for a competitor to come along to make something that's obviously better.

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

#122

Post by anjanb »

eyegor wrote: post #90
kleiba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about pdftk?

pdftk has an issue where it corrupts pdfs occasionally in modern windows server versions. Had a weird bug in a random helper service at work that we narrowed down to pdftk mangling documents sometimes. Never looked much into it since it was only a couple of hours to replace it with another tool, and haven't had issues since. I think all we used it for was merging and adding watermark text.

"replace it with another tool" which tool was that ?

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

#123

Post by fuzztester »

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…

>PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008.

Yes. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article about PDF is:

>Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.

And the last sentence of the first paragraph of the same article is:

>PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020. .

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

#124

Post by fuzztester »

cmrx64 wrote: post #82
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.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous to want a scriptable document, especially for complicated forms. Likewise for the other much-dragged features for 3d scenes. https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-in-manufacturing/ is a great usecase.

The PDF spec even supports attachments in PDF files.

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

#126

Post by vinibrito »

geraldwhen wrote: post #52
RyanShook wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, yes I think this is the right direction. Surprised it doesn’t exist as SAAS, I guess demand isn’t there.

If you want the pdf to look anything like the email, you will need to render it in a browser and capture a pdf. It’s not particularly hard if you know what you’re doing.

Any libs to help with that? Thanks.

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

#128

Post by philsnow »

cmdrriker wrote: post #71
philsnow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that one have a name? I’m a MacOS transplant and have never gotten terribly familiar with the territory. Thanks!

Preview.app which owes its heritage to NextStep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview

... ah, thanks, I misread. I thought GP was talking about a document format in the same space as PDF that was native to MacOS.

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

#130

Post by mrfumier »

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.

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