Pdfshuffler .sfs - Edit pdfs :) fantastic!

[disciple]

I haven't tried the linux version lately, but the Windows Foxit Reader has a good interface for attaching files. Even Adobe Reader can attach files on Windows, although the interface isn't good.

[disciple]

https://github.com/arrufat/pdftag
Gui to edit pdf metadata, written in vala and uses poppler

[disciple]

People might find these snippets from http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/formats/#ps interesting:

Multi-paged PDF Documents...

You can use perl to combine multiple PDF files, without resorting to a IM, and its rasterization problem...

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl
#  Script   pdf-combiner.pl
use strict;
use warnings;
use PDF::Reuse;

prFile('combo.pdf'); # Output.
for (qw/a b c d/) # Inputs.
{
  prImage("result_$_.pdf");
  prPage();
}
prEnd();

You can also use a JAVA toolkit to merge IM generated images into a PDF producing a better PDF than a simpler one that IM will generate...

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

for x in ./*.jpeg
do
    echo $x to ${x}.pdf
    convert $x -quality 75 ${x}.pdf
done

echo Merging...
java tool.pdf.Merge *.pdf

[rcrsn51]

Can you please clarify this? Is the objective to merge some individual PDFs into one file? Or is it to encapsulate some JPEG images into a PDF?

[disciple]

Another program I don't think I've mentioned, particularly for doing ocr on scanned pdfs, is the Windows freeware "pdf-xchange viewer", which apparently runs well in Wine.

I know there are some other topics here about linux OCR engines and guis, but I thought I'd mention ocrmypdf, which is probably the easiest solution for adding a layer of ocred text to a raster pdf. It is from the same author as pikepdf, which is basically a python wrapper library for qpdf.

EDIT

FWIW I did some testing with ocrmypdf.
IIRC the ocr backend it uses is tesseract. Recognition was perfect except for white space; so more accurate than pdf-xchange, which I had handy for a comparison.
It shrinks test files from the scanner at my work a bit. If I install jbig2enc (which requires leptonica) it shrinks monochrome test files even more.

I wanted to know how to remove scanned text so I converted to a new pdf using pdftocairo, which removed the text and made the file a lot bigger, so presumably it reencoded without jbig2. Interestingly, if I rerun that output through ocrmypdf the result is even smaller. I was dealing with a very small single page file though, so metadata and stuff might show as a big difference in size which wouldn't be noticeable with a large file.

[disciple]

Can you please clarify this? Is the objective to merge some individual PDFs into one file? Or is it to encapsulate some JPEG images into a PDF?

I presume you are asking about the snippets in my previous. One appears to be for combining pdfs and the other for creating a pdf from some images.

[disciple]

This is the best solution I can come up with for converting vector pdf to raster pdf. You can probably tell it is pulled from a script I run from a magic button to automate all kinds of useful things:

Code: Select all

# read in the output resolution (DPI)
read RES <image_resolution.txt
# check that RES is a number
if ! [[ "$RES" =~ ^[0-9]+ ]]
then
 RES="300"
 echo $RES>image_resolution.txt
fi
for i in !(*-rasterised).pdf
 do (
  mkdir "/tmp/$i"
  pdftocairo -jpeg -r $RES "$i" "/tmp/$i/0"
  jpegoptim "/tmp/$i/0"
  img2pdf -o "${i%%.*}-rasterised.pdf" "/tmp/$i/"*
# this method results in ugly pdfs sometimes, regardless of the compression and quality specified
#  ( convert -density $RES "$i" -compress jpeg -quality 75 -flatten "${i%%.*}-rasterised.pdf" ) &
# this method doesn't cope with spaces in filename
#  ( convert -density $RES {"$i","$i"-rasterised}.pdf ) &
  rm -R "/tmp/$i" ) &
 done
unset RES

Change the compression and quality arguments depending on the nature of your pdfs.
I thought that a tool like pdftocairo would be able to convert directly to a raster pdf, but I couldn't find any that can. It wasn't even obvious how to do it with ghostscript.
Imagemagick will convert from vector to raster pdf (using ghostscript), and is a much simpler (but slower) solution for multi page documents, but sometimes it produces bad results (even though it always produces good results when converting to normal raster image formats.)

EDIT - added jpegoptim line, which saves 10% of file size in my test.

[disciple]

Change the compression and quality arguments depending on the nature of your pdfs.

I mean choose the right raster format (-png, -jpeg, -tiff options) to convert to with pdftopoppler, referencing how img2pdf will handle it:

| JPEG | any | direct |
| JPEG2000 | any | direct |
| PNG (non-interlaced) | any | direct |
| TIFF (CCITT Group 4) | monochrome | direct |
| any | any except CMYK and monochrome | PNG Paeth |
| any | monochrome | CCITT Group 4 |
| any | CMYK | flate |

You might need to use the -mono or -gray options.
It seems poppler to cairo doesn't actually allow you to specify jpeg quality or similar. Maybe an alternative like mutool would.

[disciple]

2. pdf-xchange is the best "free" option I've seen for editing pdf bookmarks (no, this isn't a premium feature).

It looks like I never mentioned jpdfbookmarks in this thread, which is generally pretty good, but can't format the bookmarks, and seems to have a bug in its logic with export/import of complex outlines.
Two .NET/Mono based alternatives that look very good although I haven't tested extensively:
http://handyoutlinerfo.sourceforge.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/djvubookmarker/
Both work with pdf and djvu, the second is a lot more powerful it seems (formatting in particular). The first also provides a command line tool.
There is also a Windows freeware called "PDF bookmarks" from Skysof, which I haven't looked at at all.

[disciple]

https://willus.com/k2pdfopt optimizes pdf/DJVU files for small screens, including reflow even of scanned files!
Check out the example screenshots on the home page.

[disciple]

Another couple of options for cropping pdfs:
https://pypi.org/project/pdfCropMargins/ powerful python command-line tool, with gui.
http://pdfcrop.sourceforge.net/ script which uses ghostscript and pdfedit.

[disciple]

Another interesting Java based tool - just for cropping:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

This is a small application to crop PDF files. It helps the user to decide what should be cropped by creating a overlay of similar pages (=>all pages within a pdf having the same size, orientation(even/odd)).

Very similar to Briss, and also Java, is Pdf scissors

EDIT 20191021
I just cropped on Windows a study Bible with almost 2000 pages successfully using Briss, and it was very fast. Pdfscissors failed for some reason - I don't know if it was to do with the file size or something, but it took quite a lot longer and appeared to succeed, but the pages were not actually cropped.
I get the same results with a couple of other New Testaments; I guess perhaps Briss is succeeding because it is shipped on Windows with a newer version of iText than pdfscissors is...?

FWIW I just noticed there's a "pre-release" of an updated version of Briss at https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0/releases

[disciple]

pdfScale - bash Script to scale and/or resize PDFs from the command line (uses gs).

A few other tools have similar ability (currently not qpdf unfortunately) - see e.g. https://superuser.com/questions/676013/ ... mmand-line, which makes me realise - I don't think I've ever mentioned cpdf in this thread, because it used to be only available under a commercial license.

Cpdf is a very capable cross-platform command line utility that is now available free for personal use. There is also a standalone pdf "squeezer" available under the LGPL: http://community.coherentpdf.com/

[disciple]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/moonshiner/ - pygtk GUI for ps2pdf - "use Ghostscript's power in converting PostScript to PDF without worrying about the complicated command line. Change image resampling options, encryption and prepress settings and more with a few mouse clicks."
Intended to be something like adobe distiller. There are other similar projects but I'm not sure if any are maintained (moonshiner doesn't appear to be).