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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘PDF’ Category

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PDF24 Creator – Wikipedia

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/30

Just in case I ever need more features than the built-in PDF creator in Windows: PDF24 Creator – Wikipedia

PDF24 is free for commercial use and offers these features that the Windows built-in PDF support lacks:

  • Merge multiple PDF into one file
  • Rotating, extracting, inserting pages
  • Integrated preview for PDF editing
  • PDF encryption, decryption and signing
  • Change PDF information (author, title, etc.)
  • Compress and shrink PDF files
  • Add a watermark or stamp a PDF file
  • Combine pages with a digital paper
  • Convert to and from PDF
  • Multiple PDF printers for different purposes since 7.7.0
  • Full featured and lightweight PDF reader since version 8.7.0
  • Tesseract OCR engine since version 8.8.0
  • Blackening of PDF files since version 10.0.0

Via [Wayback/Archive.is] Software-update: doPDF 10.8.127 – Computer – Downloads – Tweakers (which mentions it does not need GhostScript)

–jeroen

Posted in PDF, Power User, Windows, Windows 10 | Leave a Comment »

Print Friendly & PDF

Posted by jpluimers on 2021/04/02

I bumped into [WayBack] Print Friendly & PDF: Make a Printer Friendly & PDF version of any webpage.

Though Chrome has built-in PDF output support, often web sites render like a mess with it.

Hopefully the above site makes better PDFs in those cases.

I will try to use it for those, and get back if it works.

Via:

 

–jeroen

Posted in PDF, Power User | Leave a Comment »

binaryfiles – How to convert PDF binary parts into ASCII/ANSI so I can look at it in a text editor? – Stack Overflow

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/30

The first hit of pdf binary to text – Google Search was [WayBack] binaryfiles – How to convert PDF binary parts into ASCII/ANSI so I can look at it in a text editor? – Stack Overflow has many options including:

Since I have qpdf installed on most systems:

Another useful tool to transform a PDF into an internal format that enables text editor access is qpdf. It is a “command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files”.

Example usage:

 qpdf                                  \
   --qdf                               \
   --object-streams=disable            \
     input-with-compressed-objects.pdf \
     output-with-expanded-objects.pdf
  1. The output of the QDF-mode enforced by the --qdf switch organizes and re-orders the objects neatly. It adds comments to track the original object IDs and page content streams. All object dictionaries are written into a “normalized” standard format for easier parsing.
  2. The --object-streams=disable causes the extraction of (otherwise not recognizable) individual objects that are compressed into another object’s stream data.

The recompress is easy as per [WayBack] QPDF Manual:

qpdf /tmp/uncompressed.pdf /tmp/compressed.pdf

The answer is by [WayBack] User Kurt Pfeifle – Stack Overflow who has many other interesting PDF related answers at:

Stackoverflow.com:

Superuser.com:

Serverfault.com:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, EPS/PostScript, PDF, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some tools useful for analysing PDF documents

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/03/05

A while ago, I wanted to analyse the difference of some PDF documents: why they had suddenly grown to twice their size.

[WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers en Twitter: “dat genereren kun je overigens zien als je dezelfde downloads doet, maar dan een fikse periode uit elkaar.…”

There are quite a few tools on [WayBack] Browse Internal PDF Structure – Super User and [WayBack] Best tool for inspecting PDF files? – Stack Overflow, including:

They also made me discover [WayBack] GitHub – pipwerks/PDFObject: A lightweight JavaScript utility for dynamically embedding PDFs in HTML documents documented at [WayBack] PDFObject: A JavaScript utility for embedding PDFs 

This particular case

The quickest way to analyse these for me was [WayBack] PDF Object Browser based on [WayBack] GitHub – brendandahl/pdf.js.utils: PDF.js Utility Files which is also the foundation of [WayBack] Test PDF Creator.

It runs in your web browser as local JavaScript, so it is pretty OK to load a PDF file into it: it does no “phone home”.

In this case, for generating PDF files with the same content, ABN AMRO added five Type 3 fonts of which one font was not used at all, and two others used to be Type 1 fonts.

Type 1 fonts (wikipedia)

Type 1 (also known as PostScript, PostScript Type 1, PS1, T1or Adobe Type 1) is the font format for single-byte digital fonts for use with Adobe Type Manager software and with PostScript printers. It can support font hinting.

It was originally a proprietary specification, but Adobe released the specification to third-party font manufacturers provided that all Type 1 fonts adhere to it.

Type 1 fonts are natively supported in Mac OS X, and in Windows 2000 and later via the GDI API.[2] (They are not supported in the Windows GDI+, WPF or DirectWrite APIs.)

Type 3 fonts (wikipedia)

Type 3 font (also known as PostScript Type 3 or PS3, T3 or Adobe Type 3) consists of glyphs defined using the full PostScript language, rather than just a subset. Because of this, a Type 3 font can do some things that Type 1 fonts cannot do, such as specify shading, color, and fill patterns. However, it does not support hinting. Adobe Type Manager did not support Type 3 fonts, and they are not supported as native WYSIWYG fonts on any version of Mac OS or Windows.

So far for optimised PDF rendering…

Being in software development for this long, I am constantly reminded that The inmates are running the asylum – Wikipedia. I can definitely recommend reading “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”, by Alan Cooper:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, EPS/PostScript, PDF, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

ÜberPDF printing using a Delphi like canvas

Posted by jpluimers on 2019/11/15

For my link archive, as it has a lot of goodies in the comments, especially on how to avoid bitmaps in PDF emission: [WayBack] We took PDF to a whole new level today Load create, or editing a PDF in 2 lines of code using a simple Delphi (like) Canvas! We added a PDFPrinter and… – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

–jeroen

Posted in Delphi, Development, EPS/PostScript, PDF, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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