Portable Document Format, the abstruse and inconvenient format beloved of academics, bureaucracies and… Adobe, I suppose? It has the wonderful feature of being a better format than Microsoft Word, in much the same way that sticking your hand in a blender is better than sticking your hand in a woodchipper.
Extracting data
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.
pdfplumber also exists but I have not used it.
Camelot is an OpenCV-backed table extractor. It has a browser-based gui, Excalibur.
There are both open (Tabula, pdfplumber) and closed-source tools that are widely used to extract data tables from PDFs. They either give a nice output or fail miserably. There is no in between. This is not helpful since everything in the real world, including PDF table extraction, is fuzzy.
tl;dr Tabula if you want the easiest possibly experience at the cost of some power, otherwise Camelot/Excalibur.
camelot -o table.csv -f csv lattice file.pdfPDF readers
I would like to have a PDF reader that supported the same annotations across linux and macOS and android. Is that feasible?
I’ve always disliked the gigantic Adobe Acrobloat reader. It has become particularly useless to me now since there no longer seems to be a linux version. Maybe one could run it in docker?
The KDE (okular) and GNOME (Evince default are both passable but have clunky annotation exchange. Evince in particular has a terrible UI for even viewing annotations – It summarises the text of each annotation in the sidebar as … my name and the date? I already know my name. It’s the content of the PDF I am concerned with here. I’m not saying there is no conceivable use case for this, just not a one that I have.
dan dan dan dan dan dan dan dan
mupdf might be an option although the linux versions look outdated.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
sudo apt install mupdf mupdf-toolsThere is cross platform support from the commercial app foxit.
Zathura seems to be the document viewer recommendation du jour
linuxy circles, and does auto syncing and updating and such.
It has no annotation support AFAICS but goes fast.
If you like typing / instead of Ctrl-F and think that you will save time by manually defining specific keyboard shortcuts in a config file you will feel right at home.
Command line tips
Reduce size of bloated PDF
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH \
-sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdfor, wrapped up into a nice little script,
ShrinkPDF:
(90 is the dpi here.)
./shrinkpdf.sh in.pdf out.pdf 90Concatenate or split PDFs
This ghostcript command works to concatenate PDFs:
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=output.pdf input*.pdfYou can split PDFs also with ghostscript, but usually you want a GUI to see what you are splitting, no?
PDFMix and PDF shuffler have both been recommended to me for this.
PDF to SVG
pdf2svg generates editable vector diagrams from the PDF.
HTML to PDF
See weasyprint, below.
Diffing PDFs
The use case here is, they say, a (presumably scientific) review. “You reviewed version A of a paper, and receive version B, and wonder what the changes are.” The tool is pdfdiff.
Crop marks
There are at least two options
None makes it clear which of TrimBox, BleedBox, Cropbox or ArtBox
is what you truly want.
This might clarify it slightly
but I lost focus around here.
Method A
You can add crop marks to a PDF document with different PDF tools, e.g. pdftk.:
- Export the first page with crop marks to a PDF file (your_cropmark.pdf)
- Join it with your PDF document (your_document.pdf) in the command line:
pdftk your_document.pdf multistamp your_cropmark.pdf output result.pdfMethod B
NOTE: you can set PDF cropping values with GhostScript for printing:
Create a plain text file with the right cropping values (eg. this is 5mm crop of A4):
[/CropBox [14.17 14.17 581.1 827.72] /PAGES pdfmarkAlternatively, use the command line
gs -c "[/CropBox [14.17 14.17 581.1 827.72] /PAGES pdfmark" \Now, convert your_document.pdf using the previous file (pdfmark.txt):
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
$OPTIONS \
-c .setpdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=result.pdf \
-f your_document.pdf
pdfmark.txtColor conversion
Nightmares. Colour management is generally complicated.
ghostcript colour management specifically is complicated,
and has many moving parts
that change rapidly – e.g. the -dUseCIEColor option was removed in ghostscript
9, because it is apparently a broken noob feature. Its replacement is broken
documentation.
CMYK
CMYK Color conversion of RGB PDF with GhostScript:
PDF to TIFF example.
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK \
-sColorConversionStrategyForImages=CMYK \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 \
-sOutputFile=result_cmyk.pdf \
your_document.pdfGreyscale
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sColorConversionStrategy=Gray \
-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 \
-sOutputFile=result_gray.pdf \
your_document.pdfProgrammatic editing and generation
So many of these!
Weasyprint seems the cleanest. It converts HTML+CSS into PDF, and is written in pure python. It can be used from the command line or programatically.
It is based on various libraries but not on a full rendering engine like Blink, Gecko or WebKit. The CSS layout engine is written in Python, designed for pagination, and meant to be easy to hack on.
pip install weasyprint
weasyprint https://weasyprint.org/ weasyprint.pdfsvglib provides a pure python library that
can convert SVG to PDF, and a command line utility for same, svg2pdf.
Thus one can, e.g.
add SVGs to PDFs in erportlab.
reportlab is the famed monstrous classic way of programatically generating PDFs from code. It includes a modicum of typesetting. It doesn’t edit PDFs so much, but it generates them pretty well. Its integration with other things is often weak – if you thought that insert LaTeX equations would be simple, or HTML snippets etc. On the other hand it has fancy features such as its own chart generation library. On the third hand, there are already better charting libraries that it doesn’t use. Litmus test: Use it if the following feels to you like a natural way to print two columns:
from reportlab.platypus import (
BaseDocTemplate,
Frame,
Paragraph,
PageBreak,
PageTemplate )
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
import random
words = (
"lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consetetur "
"sadipscing elitr sed diam nonumy eirmod "
"tempor invidunt ut labore et").split()
styles=getSampleStyleSheet()
Elements=[]
doc = BaseDocTemplate(
'basedoc.pdf',
showBoundary=1)
#Two Columns
frame1 = Frame(
doc.leftMargin,
doc.bottomMargin,
doc.width/2-6,
doc.height,
id='col1')
frame2 = Frame(
doc.leftMargin+doc.width/2+6,
doc.bottomMargin,
doc.width/2-6,
doc.height,
id='col2')
Elements.append(
Paragraph(
" ".join([random.choice(words) for i in range(1000)]),
styles['Normal']))
doc.addPageTemplates([
PageTemplate(id='TwoCol',frames=[frame1,frame2]),
])
#start the construction of the pdf
doc.build(Elements)pdfrw is a Python library and utility that reads and writes PDF files:
- Operations include subsetting, merging, rotating, modifying metadata, etc. …
- Can be used either standalone, or in conjunction with reportlab to reuse existing PDFs in new ones
Here is a gentle HOWTO. You can use it to put matplotlib plots in reportlab PDFs, getting the best of two bad worlds.
pypdf2 is another alternative python pdf library that looks messier.
scribus is a reasonable open-source desktop publishing tool. If your content is not amenable to automatic layout out it is a good choice, for e.g. posters. It includes a Python API, albeit a reputedly quirky one, which is AFAICT Python 2. For all that, it’s a simple and interactive way of generating PDFs programmatically, so might be worth it.
web page to pdf
wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely “headless” and do not require a display or display service.