How to work with pdf files in Fatdog

[Wognath]

On a recent morning, I had to scan documents and prepare PDFs on short notice. This led me to make a list, for future reference, of pdf utilities available in Fatdog 702. I hope it's useful. Additions would be welcome.

text to PDF
Abiword saves to pdf
puppypdf converts abw, doc, rtf, txt to pdf.

image to PDF
1)PeasyPDF works if Ghostscript is installed from the repo.
2)Gimp can export to pdf
3)Command-line utilities:

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jpegtopnm file.jpg | pnmtotiff > temp.tif
tiff2pdf -p letter -j -q 50 temp.tif > file.pdf

Add -F option to expand graphics to fill pdf.

in addition to jpegtopnm, there are 20 others including bmptopnm, pngtopnm, giftopnm. But pstopnm doesn't work: it appears to require Ghostscript.

tiff2pdf jpeg compression option ( -j -q ##) doesn't work with the binary included in Fatdog 702 (distorts colors). The attached newer version (from ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/libtiff/tiff-4.0.6.tar.gz) allows these options to be used. Without compression, the pdf is larger than the jpeg.

combine PDFs

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pdfunite *.pdf combined.pdf
pdfunite file1.pdf, file2.pdf combined.pdf

encrypt pdf

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qpdf --encrypt p4ssw0rd "" 128 -- file.pdf file-encrypted.pdf

The encrypt option is --encrypt user-pwd owner-pwd key-length [restrictions] -- http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/files/qpdf-manual.html

[jamesbond]

Thanks Wognath.

But pstopnm doesn't work: it appears to
require Ghostscript.

Anything that reads or outputs to Postscript ("PS") will most likely need ghostscript.

tiff2pdf jpeg compression option ( -j -q ##) doesn't work with the binary included in Fatdog 702 (distorts colors).

Ah, that's why I didn't see it - I used black and white image for testing (and it looked okay). I'll get tiff2pdf updated in the repo.

Another tool to consider is pdftk https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ which you can get from the repo. It has a rather large dependency though, you need to install aaa-gcc-libs-full too.

[rcrsn51]

Nice work. Here are some observations.

Puppypdf should have been retired long ago. It just sends the document to Abiword, which produces an inferior PDF. The preferred method is to load the document into a word processor and use Print > Print to File.

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jpegtopnm file.jpg | pnmtotiff > temp.tif
tiff2pdf -p letter -j -q 50 temp.tif > file.pdf

Peasyscan has switched to using tiff-tools and the matching libtiff for saving a scan to PDF. I was getting better results than with Ghostscript.

I debated incorporating libtiff into PeasyPDF, but PeasyPDF already uses Ghostscript for things like extraction.

[Edit] If you want to combine a bunch of JPEGs into a single PDF, the BEST tool is img2pdf. It is discussed in the PeasyPDF how-to.

[rufwoof]

MasterPDFeditor is a great program IMO. You can add attachments etc.

I've installed the latest version direct from CodeIndustry https://code-industry.net/free-pdf-editor/ and its working really well.

[step]

The contrib repo includes also:

wkhtmltopdf 0.12.3 dev-79ff51e (PDF cli converter)
wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command
line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats
using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely
"headless" and do not require a display or display service.

https://bitbucket.org/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf
http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

[Wognath]

Sorry to bump after so long. I just found this and thought it would be useful to add.
My original post was about utilities already present in Fatdog. But if libreoffice is installed (FD600 repo), a fairly fast command-line conversion of documents to pdf is available:

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/opt/libreoffice3.6/program/soffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir ~/NewDir file-to-convert

I have tried this on ppt, doc, xls, jpg and htm files. Occasional format problems or dropped image, esp. htm. Links survive the conversion.
Replacing file-to-convert by * does all files in working directory.
--outdir is optional; without it, output goes to working directory
Similar commands will convert to other formats, but a filter may need to be specified. See
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... -parameter
Although it doesn't open the gui, this creates a large (>20M) config file