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   Dallas (Join Something IRL) (1dalm@deacon.social)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 21:16:36 JST Dallas (Join Something IRL)

   in reply to

   • Alex Gleason

   @alex Or, heck, even a closed source alternative.

   I would PAY for a viable feature matching alternative (one time, not monthly for gawd sakes).

   Really, I would pay a one time fee for a software that just allows me to split up and merge PDF documents in a easy to use and light weight GUI. (PDFSAM used to do that, but they've moved to a monthly payment subscription plan.)

   • Embed this notice
     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.
   • Embed this notice
     Dallas (Join Something IRL) (1dalm@deacon.social)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 21:16:37 JST Dallas (Join Something IRL)

     • Alex Gleason

     @alex

     How is it possible that there is not a real viable open source alternative to Adobe Pro yet?