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PEP – An open source PDF editor for Mac
- arusahni 6y agoFor a second I thought this was a Python Enhancement Proposal.
- Paianni 6y agoReminds me of a resolution of GDPR I had when I first heard of it. 'German Democratic People's Republic'
- zaarn 6y agoIt would be the Federal Republic of Germany. Or the Democratic German Republic if you think of the east block.
- prewett 6y agoPython is "batteries included", but this sounds like a pretty hulking-big battery!
- Gys 6y agoAdding a roadmap with potential features would be nice. Otherwise one is actually asking for financing a personal pet project. A list of existing alternatives (incl MacOS Preview) could be added and an explanation why this project will be different (or ideally: better).
- insensible 6y agoYes, sell me on the problem you are solving, sell me on the technology opportunity, sell me on your approach, help me feel a sense of mission and curiosity.
- threcius 6y agoThank you for your recommendation, I think a road map is too early at this stage, but at some later point, i will at one. And for the alternatives, i think this is a good idea.
- narwally 6y agoIsn't Preview limited to just annotations, or does it also do editing?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoAside from annotating, Preview can crop, reorder, rotate, delete, and insert pages in a PDF. But at its core, it does not "non-destructively" edit the dictionaries and object graph of the original PDF. Instead, it replays the original PDF into a new PDF context.
- planb 6y agoHi, developer of a PDF scanning app for macOS (PDFScanner) here. I always toyed with the idea of developing a PDF engine from scratch but the spec scares me. Kudos for being that brave! Just curious: Why did you choose Objective-C for a new lib?
- threcius 6y agoHelllo, good question, and the answer is simple, I am more familiar with Objective-C and I get used to it.
- pier25 6y agoAren't you worried about Apple killing ObjC down the line?
- prewett 6y agoTheir whole UI is written in ObjC, they've got two decades of Mac apps in ObjC, and they wrote a whole new language to interface cleanly with ObjC but with nicer semantics, so I'm guessing ObjC isn't going anywhere. But even if Apple does remove it, everything apart from the UI would still compile in GCC's ObjC compiler. The guts of this project is the PDF engine, not the UI, and that would still work. TeX is written in a language that pretty much only Knuth uses, and it's still very much working.
- armadsen 6y agoMore than just their UI, fundamental parts of Apple's OSes are written in ObjC, including very new components like ARKit, CoreML, and the Metal API. Apple continues to write tons of new Objective-C code every day. Of course Swift is making inroads inside Apple, but Objective-C has to be well supported for a very long time to come. I've been writing Objective-C for 15 years, and continue to do about 60-70% of my work in ObjC (the rest is mostly Swift). I'm not particularly worried about my code being unusable anytime soon. When Apple starts making a real effort to wholesale migrate away from ObjC, I will too.
- wolfium3 6y agoI have a dream... that one day people will name their projects with names that don't exist on google yet. If you search for PEP now you'll find python enhancement proposals, and the "Philippine Entertainment Portal" and the stock code for PepsiCo.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tzs 6y agoI wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex, and include that number on any web page that they would like people searching for their project to find. That way once I know that say PEP the PDF editor exists and find its 128-bit number (let's say that is 379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73), at least I can subsequently toss a +379dd864b16eaca3ce94c15a6bdfcc73 on my searches to effectively let the search engine know I want PEP the PDF editor results rather than PEP the python enhancement results or PEP the entertainment portal results or PEP that refreshing beverage company stock symbol. "xxd -l 16 -p /dev/urandom" is a handy way to get a 128-bit random hex number. A UUID generator works, too, although they usually include some punctuation you will need to delete and you might have to lower case their output.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> I wish that once people do name their project, they would assign it a 128-bit random number in lower case hex We already have something similar: URLs.
- wtetzner 6y agoExcept a URL only points to one resource. The idea here is that this identifier would exist on any resource related to PEP (maybe even in URLs).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AndyMcConachie 6y agoThe one problem I consistently have with PDF forms on the Mac is an inability to change the font size in text fields. My work even pays for me to have the professional Adobe suite and that specific functionality doesn't exist. If someone could solve this problem I would probably give them some money.
- threcius 6y agoJust noted down your requirement in my Apple Notes, I think I will take a look at it later while render and editing PDF forms. These kinds of comments are what i am looking for, thank you.
- pier25 6y agoYou can't do that in InDesign?
- phonon 6y agoWhat do you mean? In Acrobat Form (acroform) fields? In Acrobat Pro DC (in Windows, but assume Mac is the same), go into Prepare Form mode, select the field (or control select for multiple text fields), right click Properties, go to Appearance tab (Text section), and the either select Font Size: Auto (for autofit) or the point size you want.
- bluedino 6y agoThe UI for all of this guys apps is very strange...is this some sort of web-wrapper for OS X or custom views or what?
- threcius 6y agoHi, i am the guy, and almost all view are custom views (native Cocoa/Objc), except that some of them (like in the About window) are WebView with HTML/CSS/Javascript.
- strogonoff 6y agoA GUI app for manually crafting PDFs is one thing, but a library instead would enable countless developers to create software capable of producing PDF deliverables as output, possibly improving the accessibility situation too. I would gladly sponsor the development of a reliable library that allows to programmatically produce compliant, accessible tagged PDFs with arbitrary layout[0], correctly printable and viewable by mainstream software. (Considering it is a difficult, yet to be solved problem, I’d have to know the qualities of the approach that distinguish said library from not-quite-capable attempts that already exist before I commit my personal funds.) I would not mind if said library’s developers release an entirely paid end-user GUI software based on it, as long as the library itself remains under active maintenance. [0] Supporting commonly used paged media typesetting features such as headers, footers, page numbers, running headers.
- tkfu 6y agoAre you familiar with Prawn [1]? Perhaps I just haven't bumped up against its limitations yet, but in my experience it's exactly what you're asking for. Of course, it's in Ruby, which isn't to everyone's taste, but it's the best tool out there that I've found. [1] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
- strogonoff 6y agoPrawn was considered and IIRC unfortunately it has very limited styling support. It looks like there are only commercial and quite expensive options for programmatic generation (Antenna House: XSL-FO, Prince: CSS). Apart from that, the one option that works appears to be Apache FOP. It’s built on Java and uses XSL-FO, which is somewhat limited and seemingly on the way to becoming outdated.
- phonon 6y agohttps://weasyprint.org/ https://weasyprint.org/ is quite nice, though has limited header/footer support (for now).
- Lammy 6y ago
- mdaniel 6y ago> its own PDF engine, built from scratch Just be careful, many larger teams have taken on that PDF spec, and it has not ended well for them: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&results_type=overview&query=pdf&search_type=all https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&res... and it seems to be one of the main actors in what are termed "polyglot" files: https://truepolyglot.hackade.org/ https://truepolyglot.hackade.org/ (of which my favorite is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18344778 0x15 is a laser-projectable PDF that's also a ZIP containing, among other things, another PDF that is also a Git repo of its own source code. )
- MKais 6y agoThe PDF file format specification has 971 pages. https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html
- threcius 6y agoAFAIK, if you read through the first few chapters of the PDF spec, then you can easily understand later chapters. PDF in itself is a simple format.
- threcius 6y agoJust create a simple PDF example by using TextEdit's export function, and open the PDF with a plain text editor, you should be easy to figure out what's going on in PDF.
- itsEtai 6y agoVery cool! I currently use adobe acrobat to make pdfs accessible (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf). Are you planning on building in accessibility tools?
- svnpenn 6y agoIf someone knows something like this for Windows, I am currently offering a bounty: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/19011 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/19011 I am willing to increase the bounty, but I only have 297 rep currently
- nisuni 6y agoThe apps by the same author are very, very interesting: http://www.pixelegg.me http://www.pixelegg.me