Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files
(chezsoi.org)99 points by Lucas-C 4 hours ago
99 points by Lucas-C 4 hours ago
There is also: https://pdfcpu.io/
That said, if you're looking for a GUI app to do simple PDF mutations it's often hard to fine a simple solid open source cross platform app.
At least I haven't found one :)
If self hosting is an option, I've found Signature PDF to be quite good.
https://github.com/24eme/signaturepdf?tab=readme-ov-file#sig...
How about this: https://tools.pdf24.org/en
It allows installation for offline use too.
For low-level work, qpdf can be quite useful: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf
CEOs often need to sign changes to employment terms or options/vesting terms and have hundreds if not thousands of employees. They don't have the time to go through and sign all of those contracts.
Its no different than the analog ages where a secretary would go through and stamp all the contracts with the CEOs signature.
Why wouldn’t a company sign documents they create automatically? This is about a cryptographic signature that lets the user verify authorship, not a visual signature in the PDF, right? So it would still be useful to be able to verify that a bank statement is really from my bank, even if it was generated without human interaction.
Not the same thing but just want to shoutout https://www.pdfgear.com/ as one of the only viable alternatives to adobe for intermediate level PDF tinkering. It’s free and available for everything except Linux.
In addition to the already mentioned, there is also pdfcpu[0], "a Go PDF processor and CLI"
I though Swiss Army knife for PDF are Didier Stevens PDF tools:
This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation.
Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of something, my take is that it does a lot of things poorly and there are better specific tools for every need. Like if you need a really terrible knife or bottle opener or screwdriver or saw, a Swiss Army knife has you covered. But it should be a tool of last resort when you have no other options.
Swiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. What do you mean, doesn't have a positive connotation?
They're great hiking, camping, traveling, in backpacks and bags.
What's wrong with it as a knife? It's perfectly sharp. Obviously it's not a full-sized chef's knife, but it will cut your apple or twine or packing tape. It's a multitool. It does lots of things. A tool of "last resort" seems to miss the point -- it's not meant to use at home, when you have a full-size screwdriver and bottle opener and corkscrew. It's for traveling with you. And it's great at that.
SAK's are iconic. I don't think your take is a common one.
Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel?
It makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing.
And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.
This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.
curiously poppler doesn't mention that anywhere on their website, but the library comes with a similar suite of tools, typically available in linux distributions.
i have found them very helpful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)#poppler-uti...