Groups | Search | Server Info | Login | Register
Groups > comp.text.pdf > #2628
| From | Marion <marion@facts.com> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | alt.comp.os.windows-11, comp.editors, comp.text.pdf, alt.comp.os.windows-10 |
| Subject | Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays |
| Date | 2025-03-04 02:35 +0000 |
| Organization | BWH Usenet Archive (https://usenet.blueworldhosting.com) |
| Message-ID | <vq5otq$2hk3$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com> (permalink) |
| References | (6 earlier) <vpuci9$m8g$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com> <vpvqbb$cd2j$2@dont-email.me> <vq0ilp$1lnp$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com> <m2mlrgF6iifU1@mid.individual.net> <vq5ebr$1h3mg$9@dont-email.me> |
Cross-posted to 4 groups.
On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 23:35:24 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote : >> The one tool missing seems to be LaTeX, for creating PDFs, but perhaps >> "create" in this context means "convert from some other typeset format" >> rather than "typeset directly to PDF" (in industry terms, "originate") > > Along those lines, is it also worth mentioning that the Cairo graphics > library includes the option for rendering drawing to PDF, among its range > of output surface types? > > <https://www.cairographics.org/manual/cairo-PDF-Surfaces.html> Regarding... x] Converts PDFs to PNG, JPEG, etc (poppler) using Cairo graphics Fist, I have to make two confessions to maintain my credibility. The first is: I cheat. I always use the ancient payware Adobe Acrobat version 6 whenever I need to convert a PDF into image formats - so I really don't know much about the concept of converting a PDF to raster or vector graphics images. The second confession is that I don't really know what other people want to do when they "say" they want to convert a PDF into an image format. But when I researched your poppler suggestion, I saw it did that well. I had never heard of Cairo until I dug into your suggestion of using it. Apparently poppler uses either the "Splash" or the "Cairo" graphics libs to translate PDF instructions into graphical drawing commands. Apparently Cairo drawing commands (i.e., pdftocairo) render the PDF onto something called a "surface" which itself can be either a raster image (PNG, JPEG, etc.) or a vector surface (DXF, SVG, etc.) for high quality. Since I use the payware, I don't know what other solutions exist, so I dug into the concept a bit to find that if you feed Inkscape a PDF, it attempts to interpret the vector elements (lines, shapes, text) to make them editable (which could be powerful for those changing PDF images). In addition, it seems Inkscape can trace a bitmap to vectorize raster images within a PDF into vector paths - which is useful for scaling. On the other hand, I found in my searches today that ImageMagick is apparently very good at converting PDFs into raster image formats (like PNG, JPEG, PPM & TIFF). Different from both Inkscape (vector) & ImageMagick (raster) is Ghostscript, which can rasterize PDFs, but using a command line (unless you combine it with GhostView) where Ghostscript splits & merges PDFs also. Having confused myself with what I said above, I should ask what people are trying to do with the image when they want to convert PDF to an image. And do they want vector images out of the PDF. Or raster? [x] Convert PDF to raster (Imagemagick,GhostScript,Poppler-pdftocairo) [x] Convert PDF to vector (Inkscape, Poppler-pdftocairo) Anything else (which is free to use)?
Back to comp.text.pdf | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar
What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-02-28 20:09 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-02-28 21:00 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-02-28 23:56 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-01 00:21 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-01 02:53 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-01 06:24 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-01 06:49 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-01 07:21 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-01 20:23 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-02 03:18 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-03 21:38 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-03 23:35 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 02:35 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-04 03:13 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 03:31 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-04 20:18 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-04 22:32 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-04 23:32 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-05 22:08 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-01 20:17 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-02 03:02 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-02 22:03 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-03 03:17 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays G <g@nowhere.invalid> - 2025-03-03 09:19 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-03 17:01 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays G <g@nowhere.invalid> - 2025-03-03 19:08 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 03:52 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-04 04:41 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Tim Slattery <TimSlattery@utexas.edu> - 2025-03-04 10:23 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-04 22:39 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Don_from_AZ <djatechNOSPAM@comcast.net.invalid> - 2025-03-04 21:28 -0700
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-03-05 01:39 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> - 2025-03-05 20:48 +1100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-06 02:18 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> - 2025-03-06 18:12 +1100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Philip Herlihy <nothing@invalid.com> - 2025-03-06 12:22 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-03-06 10:45 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-06 12:50 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-07 22:36 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-08 01:04 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-05 13:26 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-03-05 09:04 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-03-05 09:33 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-05 21:11 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-03-05 14:39 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-03-05 14:59 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-05 21:24 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2025-03-06 00:45 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-03-06 10:54 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-05 21:12 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> - 2025-03-04 19:13 +0300
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-04 22:43 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-03-04 23:34 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 23:58 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Wolf Greenblatt <wolf@greenblatt.net> - 2025-03-04 19:11 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> - 2025-03-05 12:50 +0300
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Zaidy036 <Zaidy036@air.isp.spam> - 2025-03-05 16:50 -0500
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 23:24 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-05 22:39 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Philip Herlihy <nothing@invalid.com> - 2025-03-06 12:17 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-03-06 13:33 +0100
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> - 2025-03-07 22:43 +0000
Re: What is the best free software for creating & editing PDFs nowadays Marion <marion@facts.com> - 2025-03-04 23:53 +0000
csiph-web