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
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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
- The output of the
QDF-mode enforced by the--qdfswitch 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.- The
--object-streams=disablecauses 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:
- My SO answers to [PDF]-tagged questions
- My SO answers to [Ghostscript]-tagged questions
- My SO answers to [ImageMagick]-tagged questions
Superuser.com:
Serverfault.com:
–jeroen
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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 
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 (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 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
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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 »
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/11/05
For my link archive: [WayBack] Next up: TPDFPrinter and TPDFCanvas Expect a high paced (and easy) update cycle for Ultra, with a constant stream of new goodies! Zero hassles – it … – Joe C. Hecht – Google+
–jeroen
Posted in Delphi, Development, PDF, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
