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   翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 21:16:36 JST 翠星石

   in reply to
   @1dalm >real viable "open source" alternative to Adobe Pro yet?
   First of all, GNU/Jihad against "open source" and all other forms of proprietary software!!!!!!
   
   Plenty of free software pdf readers exist, off the top of my head there's: mupdf, poppler, evince, zathura, okular - which all display pdf's with excellent performance unlike "Adobe Acrobat".
   
   It seems that adobe has intentionally sabotaged the pdf format, so only they can write a "convenient" in-place editor, but you giving in and paying the proprietary masters for such functionality makes the problem worse.
   
   I personally just edit pdf's with a hexeditor or GIMP or inkscape if the need arrives.
   
   
   >software that just allows me to split up and merge PDF documents in a easy to use and light weight GUI.
   Why on earth would you want a GUI just to split and merge pdf's?
   
   Poppler comes with the "pdfseparate" program and splitting a pdf is as trivial as:
   pdf-split.sh:
   #!/bin/bash
   pdfseparate $1 "${1%.*}_%d.pdf"
   
   With invocation: ~/scripts/pdf-split.sh <pdf file> each page appears in the current directory postfixed with _<number>.
   
   
   Merging a pdf is a little bit harder as that format really does not like merging.
   
   GNU ghostscript (https://www.ghostscript.com/) can merge a pdf like so:
   
   pdf-unite.sh:
   #!/bin/bash
   if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
   echo 'Missing arguments'
   exit 0
   fi
   
   gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
   -dDownsampleMonoImages=false -dDownsampleGrayImages=false -sOutputFile=joined.pdf -dBATCH "$@"
   
   Invocation: ~/scripts/pdf-unite.sh <pdf file 0> <pdf file 1> ...
   
   Last time I checked it couldn't merge all pdf files (but that's probably fixed by now).
   
   
   With the power of LaTeX and the whole TexLive, you can merge all pdf files:
   merge-pdf.sh:
   #!/bin/bash
   if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
   echo 'Missing arguments'
   exit 0
   fi
   
   echo "\documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{pdfpages}
   \begin{document}" > merged.tex
   
   for pdf in "$@"; do
   echo "\includepdf[pages=-]{$pdf}" >> merged.tex
   done
   
   echo "\end{document}" >> merged.tex
   
   pdflatex merged.tex && rm merged.tex
   
   
   
   
   If I wanted to, I could write a GUI on top of GNU Ghostscript that could split and merge pdf files - but GUI's for most computing tasks are a huge waste of time when the shell is faster and easier to use.