Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

chezsoi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 100 posts

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#21

Post by arethuza »

echoangle wrote: post #14
blknight wrote: post #7

I’m curious: what good would automating signing a PDF through a utility do? The whole purpose of a signature is that a person signed and agreed to something. That cannot be done automatically.

Why wouldn’t a company sign documents they create automatically? This is about a cryptographic signature that lets the user verify authorship, not a visual signature in the PDF, right? So it would still be useful to be able to verify that a bank statement is really from my bank, even if it was generated without human interaction.

Also allowing you to detect whether any changes have been made since the signature was applied.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#22

Post by Chris2048 »

theothertimcook wrote: post #16

Not the same thing but just want to shoutout https://www.pdfgear.com/ as one of the only viable alternatives to adobe for intermediate level PDF tinkering. It’s free and available for everything except Linux.

I found it suspicious, they formerly sent stuff too their cloud without it being obvious, and the company seems to mod their own subreddit.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#23

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

SpacemannSpiff wrote: post #13

Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

It makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing.

And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#25

Post by alanbernstein »

SpacemannSpiff wrote: post #13

Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#26

Post by ripe »

layer8 wrote: post #24

For low-level work, qpdf can be quite useful: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf

Came here to say this. Qpdf is my go-to for manipulating pdf files on the command line. Encrypting, decrypting, extracting and merging pages.

It's Apache-licensed and written in C++.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#27

Post by llm_nerd »

This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation.

Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of something, my take is that it does a lot of things poorly and there are better specific tools for every need. Like if you need a really terrible knife or bottle opener or screwdriver or saw, a Swiss Army knife has you covered. But it should be a tool of last resort when you have no other options.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#28

Post by moopie »

SpacemannSpiff wrote: post #13

Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

It’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#29

Post by crazygringo »

llm_nerd wrote: post #27

This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation. Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of some…

Swiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. What do you mean, doesn't have a positive connotation?

They're great hiking, camping, traveling, in backpacks and bags.

What's wrong with it as a knife? It's perfectly sharp. Obviously it's not a full-sized chef's knife, but it will cut your apple or twine or packing tape. It's a multitool. It does lots of things. A tool of "last resort" seems to miss the point -- it's not meant to use at home, when you have a full-size screwdriver and bottle opener and corkscrew. It's for traveling with you. And it's great at that.

SAK's are iconic. I don't think your take is a common one.

Re: Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

#30

Post by pseingatl »

llm_nerd wrote: post #27

This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation. Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of some…

9/11 killed them. They used to be sold in airports.
Post reply on HN