OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Applications => Topic started by: Per E. Johannessen on October 11, 2014, 08:30:49 pm

Title: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 11, 2014, 08:30:49 pm
Does anyone know about a program (for eCS/OS2) that is capable of editing pdf-files
such as adding text/annotations ?
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: guzzi on October 12, 2014, 01:19:07 am
There is pdfbox, for Java, but that will not do exactly what you want. Still might be worth to take a look at.
https://pdfbox.apache.org/
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 13, 2014, 02:07:05 pm
Had a look at it, but it won't do what I need.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: ivan on October 13, 2014, 04:17:44 pm
As far as I know there are very few programs that will let you annotate PDF files on any computer system.  Most of them require Adobe programs to do so.

There are also web based ways of doing this but we have never tried them. 

When we have need to modify a PDF we normally revert it back to text and pictures, work on those and then recompile it back to a PDF which I don't think is what you are trying to do.  The other thing is, what type of PDF are you trying to annotate - flowed text or fixed image pages?  If the latter, it is possible to convert the PDF to single page images with something like PDFsam (a java program), annotate the images in something like Embellish and then reassemble the individual images back into a PDF.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 13, 2014, 06:23:28 pm
I simply need to add some text/numbers to invoices which I receive in pdf-format. Converting them to other formats for editing will take too long time, also it seems that some formatting is lost in the process. GSView/ghostscript works fine for lots of things, but not for adding text. Perhaps there is a way to make it work but I wouldn't even know where to start.
Looks like I have to continue using Adobe/Win for this task.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 13, 2014, 07:22:35 pm
Hi.

I only know Acrobat Pro (Windows) to be able to highlight, include notes and add text boxes on a PDF.

But it will be interesting to find if there is open source software that can do the same thing and check the effort of migrating it to the eCS-Platform.

Regards
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: eirik on October 13, 2014, 07:36:13 pm
Hi,

the pdf suite Foxit opens for editing, and it is quite good according to a friend of mine.  As far as I know, it only runs on Win platforms.  More info at: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/PDF_Editor/

30 days free trial.  After that, costs of US $ 89.  Buying a block order could get costs down and a ported version could be added to the eCS license costs if not too much (I have no idea where the pain limit for private users is, but I expect no more than US $ 20, and that could be difficult to make the Foxit people accept given their own pricing strategy).

Eirik
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 13, 2014, 08:09:31 pm
There are several programs that can do what I look for, but they're all written for other OS's, mostly Windows.
Best would be to have a native program, of course, but a java program that runs well with OS2 would be better than booting Win to get the job done.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Silvan Scherrer on October 14, 2014, 10:12:08 am
QPDFView is able to add annotations and bookmarks and some more IIRC

regards
Silvan
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Andi B. on October 14, 2014, 12:32:33 pm
Foxit Reader is free and can annotate text and draw and highlight and .... too. Unfortunately only Win. Same with PDFXEdit.
 
Never tried QPDFview for annotation anything. Not even find a way do to that. For viewing pdf it's okay. Although for some documents rather slow compared to Win/Foxit (takes ages to zoom in/out compared to Foxit/Win).

Lucide and guess QPDFView can fill in predefined fields. But that's not what Per E. needs unfortunately.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: ivan on October 14, 2014, 01:33:46 pm
Per,

If you are already doing what you want using windows, rather than having to leave OS/2 eCS why not do what we do.  When we check the service manuals we produce we need to see how they will look in various windows based programs.  To do this we use a very cut down version of win XP running in VirtualBox on OS/2 (since XP has reached its EoL we are working on making a cut down win 7 to replace it).

I don't know if this is any help but it does mean you can keep on working on your eCS machine.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 14, 2014, 01:54:50 pm
For the time being I am using VirtualPC/XP, (sometimes I boot to another win-installation) so I will continue doing it this way until there, hopefully, is a better way.

Just had a look at "Master PDF Editor", available for the usual platforms, but I read somewhere that it's written in QT and since we have QT for OS2, could this be a possibility?
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on October 14, 2014, 03:55:50 pm
Google Docs provides a pretty nice way to edit documents. Their native format appears to be PDF. Thanks to having a decent Firefox port, this works pretty well on eComStation.

Google Docs is oriented toward the cloud, but can operate on documents stored locally on the hard drive. If documents are stored on the cloud, then this is a reasonable way to share the document between your eCS machine and your phone/tablet. At least with iPad, Google docs can also open docs on the eCS SAMBA shares, if you have SAMBA server running.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Silvan Scherrer on October 14, 2014, 04:47:30 pm
Foxit Reader is free and can annotate text and draw and highlight and .... too. Unfortunately only Win. Same with PDFXEdit.
 
Never tried QPDFview for annotation anything. Not even find a way do to that. For viewing pdf it's okay. Although for some documents rather slow compared to Win/Foxit (takes ages to zoom in/out compared to Foxit/Win).

Lucide and guess QPDFView can fill in predefined fields. But that's not what Per E. needs unfortunately.

Andi,
then you have to look closer. Annotations and bookmarks work like a charm.

regards
Silvan
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 14, 2014, 07:51:26 pm
Silvan, just a quick note. There is a little mistake on QPDFView install.os2.

It says:
Quote
poppler
-------

  1. yum poppler poppler-qt

I think it is: yum install poppler-qt

My issue is that I don't use CUPS and it is mandatory for it to run. CUPS  gives me trouble installing it. I  need to read more about it. It says it need to be installed on the root but I don't want to do that.

Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 14, 2014, 08:07:04 pm
Normally I don't mind installing "some extras" in order to get something to run, but there seems to be quite a lot that has to be in place for running Qpdfview. Like Martin, I don't use cups either, tried it once but couldn't make it work. That may have changed with newer releases so I'll have another look at it.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 15, 2014, 02:27:10 am
Changing the subject, maybe we can help to put CUPS on the rpm/yum installer. I'm not sure if it will work, but it can be interesting to learn how to create rpm/yum packages and try to upload them to netlabs server.

Regards
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: ivan on October 15, 2014, 09:26:33 am
You don't need cups unless you want to do printing and since it won't talk to our printer on a print server I don't have it installed.  Also you don't need rpm/yum because all it does is install some necessary DLLs, all of which may already be installed anyway.

What we do need is for the support DLLs to either be included with the package or be provided as a separate package like those for the latest versions of firefox.

While we are talking installers I would like to see something that installs printers - something like the installer they use in elementalOS Linux.  Select new printer, select samba printing, browse for printer, select printer from list, install and it is done.  Picks up network printers as well as local ones without problems.  This is something we need on OS/2 eCS especially if we want to attract more people to our OS.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 15, 2014, 12:29:49 pm
I placed cups.dll in the Qpdfview directory and it works. Annotations seems to work also and that is good, but still I need to have some "free text" or a text box with possibility to choose size of the font. This text has to be visible when opening the document and not "hidden" in an annotation.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Silvan Scherrer on October 15, 2014, 01:51:17 pm
What we do need is for the support DLLs to either be included with the package or be provided as a separate package like those for the latest versions of firefox.
As the readme tells where to download the needed dll I guess thats enough. And if not everyone is free to create such support dll packages.
While we are talking installers I would like to see something that installs printers - something like the installer they use in elementalOS Linux.  Select new printer, select samba printing, browse for printer, select printer from list, install and it is done.  Picks up network printers as well as local ones without problems.  This is something we need on OS/2 eCS especially if we want to attract more people to our OS.
Such an installer is available from Alex Taylor. In ecs 2.2 beta it's included. I don't know where to download offhand.

regards
Silvan
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Silvan Scherrer on October 15, 2014, 01:52:35 pm
Silvan, just a quick not. There is a little mistake on QPDFView install.os2.

It says:
Quote
poppler
-------

  1. yum poppler poppler-qt

I think it is: yum install poppler-qt

My issue is that I don't use CUPS and it is mandatory for it to run. CUPS  gives me trouble installing it. I  need to read more about it. It says it need to be installed on the root but I don't want to do that.
Please always open a ticket for such things. I can't go over all Forums and look for possible bugs.

regards
Silvan
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: ivan on October 15, 2014, 02:52:15 pm
Hi Silvan,

You know that most people don't read the instructions when installing anything new  ;D  they generally try, fail and then complain hence my saying it would be an advantage if the required DLLs could be downloaded as one package.

Thanks for the information that Alex has produced something I will have to try and find it and do some tests.  It is one of the things that people trying OS/2 eCS that I know of complain about, the other is having gigabit network cards and not having drivers for them.

Thank you for the time and effort you put in to help keep our OS up and running.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Per E. Johannessen on October 15, 2014, 03:50:31 pm
Hmmm,.....looks like the topic "Edit pdf files" is drowing here, so I repeat my last post:

I placed cups.dll in the Qpdfview directory and it works. Annotations seems to work also and that is good, but still I need to have some "free text" or a text box with possibility to choose size of the font. This text has to be visible when opening the document and not "hidden" in an annotation.
Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 15, 2014, 05:18:48 pm
Hi Per.

You are right. I have to say that qpdfview is a keeper on this subject.

I tried putting cups.dll on the directory (like you told) and it runs. I added some annotations to a PDF, some highlight and after that save it and also try out on Lucide. Very good.  It is sad that I have not the time to test all ported software, I should knew about this before  :)

Check out the screenshots for everyone else.

Title: Re: Edit pdf files
Post by: guzzi on October 16, 2014, 12:07:12 am
Such an installer is available from Alex Taylor. In ecs 2.2 beta it's included. I don't know where to download offhand.

regards
Silvan
[/quote]

http://www.altsan.org/os2/printing/