41–50 of 100 posts
There is also: https://pdfcpu.io/ That said, if you're looking for a GUI app to do simple PDF mutations it's often hard to fine a simple solid open source cross platform app. At least I haven't found one :)
sorry, too spooky even for october. :-)
There is also: https://pdfcpu.io/ That said, if you're looking for a GUI app to do simple PDF mutations it's often hard to fine a simple solid open source cross platform app. At least I haven't found one :)
I found PDF SAM basic ("split and merge") well done: https://pdfsam.org/en/pdfsam-basic/ . That one is open-source and multi-platform, they have more features in a paying superset project.
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”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Swiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. It isn't as popular as ever, at least not in the Western world. I don't know what your frame of reference is, but it is positively non-existent compared to a couple of decades ago. Approximately zero kids, give or take a few, put one on their Christmas list, where when I was a kid it was many kid's dream item. I would say the most common buyer today are middle-aged me…
See my other comment for its popularity statistics. Victorinox is literally the #1 multitool brand by market share. These are facts. Your take is idiosyncratic. Using a SAK doesn't mean "you probably screwed up". That's truly a bizarre thing to say. A SAK is a perfectly fine metaphor. That's why it's a popular one. It's a small tool that does lots of things. I think you're overthinking this.
This doesn't repudiate anything I said, and it's a particularly weird canard.
>That's why it's a popular one
Increasingly the only ones I see leveraging the metaphor are English as a second language writers (note that the idiom originates in English and is a calque in other languages) who perhaps came across it somewhere. I would hardly call it "popular", and I pointed out the reality that many readers, such as myself, find it a negative description, similar to someone calling themselves a "jack of all trades". Your defensiveness of SAK does not change this, and your attempts at invalidating my statement borders on bizarre.
Feel free to continue. I'm done here.
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++.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See my other comment for its popularity statistics. Victorinox is literally the #1 multitool brand by market share. These are facts. Your take is idiosyncratic. Using a SAK doesn't mean "you probably screwed up". That's truly a bizarre thing to say. A SAK is a perfectly fine metaphor. That's why it's a popular one. It's a small tool that does lots of things. I think you're overthinking this.
>Victorinox is literally the #1 multitool brand by market share This doesn't repudiate anything I said, and it's a particularly weird canard. >That's why it's a popular one Increasingly the only ones I see leveraging the metaphor are English as a second language writers (note that the idiom originates in English and is a calque in other languages) who perhaps came across it somewhere. I would hardly call it "popular"…
Your prejudice is showing. Where would you even get an idea like that?
I hope you understand that people whose first language isn't English also use SAKs. It's not just an English thing. They're not trying to repeat some unknown object they've only encountered in metaphor. The tools are literally Swiss. And popular around the entire world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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++.
How do you use qpdf for extraction when its README states “qpdf does not render PDFs or perform text extraction, and it does not contain higher-level interfaces for working with page contents.”
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.
There are a million python libraries and tools to do some overlapping subset of the things you'd want to do with a pdf.
There are no doubt another million in other languages.
These are each basically bundles of some of the transformations you'd want to make to the same underlying data structure.
So, complex pdf scripts often need two or three different libraries to get their thing done, which is wasteful at borh a dev effort and computational level.
The ecosystem would be greatly improved if someone made a great (probably rust based) in-memory low level pdf reading and writing data structure.
PDF libraries in any language could switch to using that structure and library internally, with the carrot that the switch would result in needing less code, and likely being some combination of faster and safer.
And then if they just exposed get_structure_pointer() and set_structure_pointer(), they could all interoperate for free. (Another carrot for joining -- small libraries could usefully add features and be adopted without needing to pick an existing popular library to glom onto.)
Not sure what would economically cause this to happen, but it would be great.