Personal computing discussed
meerkt wrote:Why's PDF always such a pain?
just brew it! wrote:I've been using the CLI version of this on Linux for years. I see they now have a GUI version for Windows too (free version with limited functionality, or a "Pro" version for the whopping price of $3.99). Aside from the compression, it looks like the free version does what you need.
arunphilip wrote:@OP - Slightly confusingly, the CLI version is called PDFtk Server, presumably reflecting its origins. But that's the one you'd need if you don't want the GUI. The man page for the CLI has an example of combining PDFs into one.
just brew it! wrote:meerkt wrote:Skrewy proprietary formats FTL.Why's PDF always such a pain?
meerkt wrote:just brew it! wrote:meerkt wrote:Skrewy proprietary formats FTL.Why's PDF always such a pain?
The specs are published, and there are plenty of tools. Just not a nice all-in-one that isn't bloatware, AFAIK.
just brew it! wrote:meerkt wrote:just brew it! wrote:Skrewy proprietary formats FTL.
The specs are published, and there are plenty of tools. Just not a nice all-in-one that isn't bloatware, AFAIK.
Ever tried to deal with PDF forms on a Linux system? It seems the only viable solutions are a Windows VM, or figure out how to get a years-old (and no longer maintained) version of Acrobat Reader for Linux to run on a modern distro.
meerkt wrote:The specs are published, and there are plenty of tools. Just not a nice all-in-one that isn't bloatware, AFAIK.
The Egg wrote:I've been using 'Adobe Acrobat X Standard'. When making a single PDF from a list of spreadsheets, is it possible to do in the background instead of stealing the focus for 5-10 minutes?I had them go with Foxit PhantomPDF Business at work, and there's no difference in functionality for what we do. It's $129/license, whereas Adobe was $300+ last time I checked.
Mr Bill wrote:The Egg wrote:I've been using Adobe X Standard. When making a single PDF from a list of spreadsheets, is it possible to do in the background instead of stealing the focus for 5-10 minutes?I had them go with Foxit PhantomPDF Business at work, and there's no difference in functionality for what we do. It's $129/license, whereas Adobe was $300+ last time I checked.
Mr Bill wrote:I've been using Adobe X Standard.
bthylafh wrote:Oops, 'Adobe Acrobat X Standard'Mr Bill wrote:I've been using Adobe X Standard.
*twitch*
Do you refer to Microsoft Office as "Microsoft 2013"?
The Egg wrote:I had them go with Foxit PhantomPDF Business at work, and there's no difference in functionality for what we do. It's $129/license, whereas Adobe was $300+ last time I checked.
chuckula wrote:The XFA forms are a giant PITA. My Linux solution is to run a recent version of Acrobat via Wine which works fine for my uses. Regular PDF forms that aren't using the proprietary XFA crap do work pretty well using standard open-source programs like Okular, however.
derFunkenstein wrote:chuckula wrote:The XFA forms are a giant PITA. My Linux solution is to run a recent version of Acrobat via Wine which works fine for my uses. Regular PDF forms that aren't using the proprietary XFA crap do work pretty well using standard open-source programs like Okular, however.
The powers that be had decided that a form-based module in our web app should use XFA forms, so that printed forms always looked like what you were filling out. That was seen as a bonus by users, because this area of the K-12 education world was (and to an extent, still is) very dead-tree oriented.
Eventually Adobe Reader DC started to break XFA compatibility and I was tasked with figuring out what Adobe's plans were so we could make an educated decision on what to do. I was on a conference call with Adobe where they told us that LiveCycle ES4 was going to go the way of the dodo (EoS is March of next year, btw) and we were supposed to move these forms to some sort of HTML-based document server. Not long after all that, Google dropped NPAPI support anyway, so suddenly you couldn't edit these forms in anything but IE11 or Safari.
It was easier to just rewrite the front-end with HTML and JavaScript, and the same XML-formatted data that populated the XFA forms now populates these HTML ones. Everyone's happy.