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Subject: Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays
Date: 3 Mar 2025 09:19:35 GMT
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In comp.editors Marion <marion@facts.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 22:03:12 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote :
> 
>> Perhaps another one I should mention is PDFMiner. This is a bit of a 
>> specialist one, focused on extracting text items from a PDF page, and 
>> using various heuristics to try to reassemble them into larger text 
>> blocks.
> 
> Thank you for adding value to the spirit of this conversation where the PDF
> experts and editing experts are involved, along with the Windows users.
> 
> Looking up what the PDFMiner Python tool can do for us, it's important to
> note it's apparently designed for extracting information from PDF files.
> 
> I'm not quite sure how PDFMinor differs from any of the other text
> extractors (e.g., PDF to TEXT) but it seems to gather layout data also.
> 
> While it can extract metadata, it seems to me it's mostly used to "mine"
> large assemblages of PDF files for textual data of interest to the user.
> 
> The original PDFMiner has apparently  been forked as pdfminer.six, which,
> as far as I can tell from date stamps, is still actively being updated.
> <https://github.com/euske/pdfminer>
> <https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six>
> 
> Since it functions on windows, (within the python enviroment) and since it
> does something useful (mine text in PDFs), I'll add it to the PDF chart as
> [x] Extract text (poppler) or mine textual & metadata (pdfminersix)
> 
> Here's the current chart, where I simply ask for more things done to PDFs.
> [?] Print book format PDF (FinePrint payware)
> [x] Add or concatenate pages (pdftk, acrobat payware)
> [x] Add signature (Adobe Reader Fill-and-sign sign-yourself tool)
> [x] Archive sites (wkhtmltopdf, Acrobat payware,fastone scroll capture)
> [x] Compress PDFs (ImageMagick, PDFgear, rlvision)
> [x] Convert PDF to MSOffice (PDFgear, Calibre for MS Word only)
> [x] Convert PDF to MSWord (Calibre, PDFgear)
> [x] Convert PDF to epub format (Calibre)
> [x] Convert PDF to PostScript (Calibre, Poppler)
> [x] Converts PDFs to HTML (poppler)
> [x] Converts PDFs to PNG, JPEG, etc (poppler) using Cairo graphics
> [x] Converts PDFs to PPM/PGM/PBM image formats (poppler)
> [x] Create PDF new text (Irfanview or Paint.NET plugins + Ghostscript)
> [x] Edit PDF existing text (Adobe Reader commenting, Acrobat payware)
> [x] Embeds files into a PDF as attachments (poppler) 
> [x] Extract images (PDF Exchange Viewer, PDF Shaper, PDFgear, poppler)
> [x] Extract text (poppler) or mine textual & metadata (pdfminersix)
> [x] Extracts embedded files (attachments) from a PDF (poppler)
> [x] Fastest PDF readers (Sumatra or Foxit)
> [x] Globally search & replace PDF text (Libre Office)
> [x] List fonts used in a PDF (poppler)
> [x] Merge PDFs (pdfsam, pdftk, PDFgear, Poppler) 
> [x] Metadata display on command line (poppler)
> [x] Metadata removal (LibreOffice Writer, PDFgear offline)
> [x] OCR, PDF-Xchange, freeOCR (paperfile.net), GOCR (jocr.sourceforge.net)
> [x] Offline encrypt PDF with a password (pdfencrypt)
> [x] Online shrink PDF <adobe.com/acrobat/online/compress-pdf.html>
> [x] PDF text to audio file (Balabolka)
> [x] Remove pages (pdfsam, pdftk)
> [x] Remove restrictions (Ghostscript,Ghostview,ps2edit,pdfwrite,pdf2djvu)
> [x] Renumber pages (Acrobat Reader)
> [x] Reorder pages (mutool)
> [x] Rotate pages (Acrobat Reader)
> [x] Separates a PDF into individual pages (poppler)
> [x] Split PDFs (PDFgear, Poppler) 
> [x] Tile PDFs (i.e., to print large posters) (Posterazor)
> [?] What other tasks do you do to edit or modify a PDF file?

I suppose all are available for Windows, it would be useful to know which are
also for Linux or Mac.

G