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Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

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

#51

Post by WillAdams »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #40

due to the nature of PDF, none of the tools mentioned here can do things as simple as detecting tables on pages with high accuracy PDF is absolutely mint for display but it really suffers when parsing is involved

Yeah, I've been expecting someone to work up a system where:

- source file is .md

- file is compiled to .pdf _and_ the .md source file is included as an attachment

- when working with the file beyond viewing as a .pdf the .md is extracted and used instead of the .pdf

The LaTeX folks have a similar system ages ago where the .tex source would be included in a .pdf made from a .tex file for embedding in documents so that it could be sent in say an e-mail and then edited by the recipient --- absolutely awesome for discussing math via e-mail.

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

#52

Post by huflungdung »

JackC wrote: post #50

Opinion from 10 years ago, I suspect still valid: 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 ge…

[dead]

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

#53

Post by suhlig »

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/

> Every time someone reinvents the wheel, it becomes a little rounder.

Not sure if this particular library is an improvement, but even if it serves nothing but the author’s enjoyment, or education, it’s a win.

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

#54

Post by gpvos »

llm_nerd wrote: post #44
crazygringo wrote: post #38

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"…

> This doesn't repudiate anything I said, and it's a particularly weird canard.

It does repudiate it, directly. What are you on about?

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

#55

Post by montefischer »

One feature I would love is the ability to automatically generate the table of contents / “outline” metadata for a pdf. I run across a lot of old book pdfs without that metadata, which makes navigation annoying. Kybook3 has a version of this that doesn’t quite work. Maybe in the age of LLMs, this is now feasible.

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

#56

Post by llm_nerd »

gpvos wrote: post #54
llm_nerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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"…

> This doesn't repudiate anything I said, and it's a particularly weird canard. It does repudiate it, directly. What are you on about?

It doesn't remotely repudiate anything I said, more than saying that Gpvos is the #1 seller of buggy whips ergo ipso facto buggy whips are super popular. This is not a hard logical chain to follow, so good god.

But secondly, even that site claimed they have what, a 20% marketshare of multitools from once owning the market entirely to themselves? Even if we were so profoundly simple that we believed that being the biggest vendor in a market validates the market, this particular example is hilarious.

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

#57

Post by hbarka »

crazygringo wrote: post #46
llm_nerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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"…

> are English as a second language writers who perhaps came across it somewhere 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…

You’re absolutely right. I was just in Switzerland and I’ll tell you the Victorinox shops have endless visitors from all kinds of tourists. Swiss Army knife metaphor is timeless, at least for those who go out. Maybe there’s a generation where outdoor activities is an unknown because computers. At this point the other person is just being argumentative.

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

#58

Post by apf6 »

WillAdams wrote: post #51
VeejayRampay wrote: post #40

due to the nature of PDF, none of the tools mentioned here can do things as simple as detecting tables on pages with high accuracy PDF is absolutely mint for display but it really suffers when parsing is involved

Yeah, I've been expecting someone to work up a system where: - source file is .md - file is compiled to .pdf _and_ the .md source file is included as an attachment - when working with the file beyond viewing as a .pdf the .md is extracted and used instead of the .pdf The LaTeX folks have a similar system ages ago where the .tex source would be included in a .pdf made from a .tex file for embedding in documents so tha…

That's a good concept but I don't think Markdown is expressive enough for all the layouts & formatting that people typically want in PDFs. More likely that the source format would be something like HTML or SVG or .docx.

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

#59

Post by llm_nerd »

hbarka wrote: post #57
crazygringo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are English as a second language writers who perhaps came across it somewhere 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…

You’re absolutely right. I was just in Switzerland and I’ll tell you the Victorinox shops have endless visitors from all kinds of tourists. Swiss Army knife metaphor is timeless, at least for those who go out. Maybe there’s a generation where outdoor activities is an unknown because computers. At this point the other person is just being argumentative.

I'm being argumentative? Uproarious.

Arguing that my observations are invalid because you were in a Victorinox shop in Switzerland is the chef's kiss on this ridiculous discussion.

In the future, just move along. The other argumentative guy had no reason to get defensive about SAK, and this whole worthless discussion, from a basic observation about idioms and ill-suited tools, is a waste of bits.

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

#60

Post by laserbeam »

This, is gorgeous! I absolutely hate the PDF ecosystem, and how painful it is to get a reasonably simple tool to just do basic edits to files (adding/removing pages, combining multiple PDFs etc). I particularly hate how hard it is to find good swiss army knives for it, and how you always land on sketchy websites to do simple things to a file.

This looks dead simple to use! LOVE IT.

The one feature request I have is for adjusting margins (adding/removing fixed amount of space from every page, optionally adding/removing different amounts from odd numbered pages). Target audience: People who want to read PDFs on small ebook readers.

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