Talk:List of PDF software

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[edit] Appropriate?

When I see a "List of" such as this one I have to wonder if it's appropriate. As I hope every editor of Wikipedia is aware Wikipedia is not a link farm.

I'm not proposing a VfD (vote for deletion) but I am asking what we can do to enhance the content of this article to make it more encylopedic and generally more useful. It seems inelegant to have so many red links and external links and so little content.

As for the discussion below ... WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox.

JimD 21:52, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I think such lists are appropriate. Encyclopedias are supposed to be encyclopedic. Encyclopedic information is complete information, and such a list imparts just that. It's not a list of "notable" PDF software, it's a list of PDF software, period. The red links bother me-- not because they're there, but becuase there are no articles associated. The proper action is not to delete all red links, but to add articles for them.

Even if it was a list of only "notable" PDF software, how do you measure that? I added a piece of software that was recommended on a Microsoft page. Plus it has features I haven't seen in other free programs, such as converting PDFs to various image formats. That seems notable to me, but my addition was deleted because it was a red link.

--Skylights76 22:28, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the argument "Encyclopedic information is complete information" is currently accepted. See [1]. In terms of whether it is notable software, "notable" has a special meaning in this connection as in "notable enough to have a Wikipedia article of its own". By this definition, clearly redlinks don't work. Indeed, an article was recently created, linked, deemed not notable, deleted and unlinked: this is the proper application of Wikipedia's procedures. Notinasnaid 07:11, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] free software priority

See Jimmy Wales's blog.a thing 05:00, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't see what this website's sofware architecture has anything to do with what is to be listed or prioritised in this article. What are you talking about? --Perfecto 06:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
You clearly don't get the point of the article. Try reading it again. a thing 06:22, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
OK I give up, what's your point of posting the above blog in the discussion page of List of PDF software? --Perfecto 06:33, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Free knowledge cannot use/promote nonfree software. a thing 17:11, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
I see. If this is what you think, then start with the biggest nonfree software mentioned/prioritised in Wikipedia. Go nominate Microsoft, Computer Associates and Oracle Corporation for deletion. When you're done, let's talk again. --Perfecto 22:21, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
Of course deleting the nonfree software would ridiculous, like saying that they don't even exist. However glorifing them shouldn't be done. a thing 00:37, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
In addition to being ridiculous, removing all references to non-free software in Wikipedia, I feel, would raise POV issues as well. While Wikipedia IS open-source, we don't need the vast amount of zealotry I commonly see on Slashdot. Brian Ryans 12:18, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be absolutely wrong for this article to favour either free, or non-free software, unless that reflected Wikipedia policy. This "free is better" ideology is a point of view, and POV writing is forbidden under Wikipedia policies. 62.189.130.33 11:54, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

I found the content on this article very interesting, is not like the guy who made it is getting some extra bucks for listing the viewers, creators, etc, it's just information, examples.

[edit] PDF Software's Rarity

Surely Wikipedia is supposed to be a useful website- this is a very useful page, with lots of links to other wikis, not other websites.

[edit] Free?

Most of this software is commercial. :( --CorfiX 04:12, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] cleanup

I started cleaning the page. Devided in multiple section. You're more than welcome to help correct any mistakes I made. or comment if you have an idea. I'm still kind of confused wheter I should give libaries/extensions it's own section. I assume libaries are not usefull for end-users.

After it's clean of all the spam, all the links that have a link in wikipedia will be moved above the "external" links. That way, in the future it's easier to identify a "spam" link.

Last 7 section are work in progress, as you can see most links in those section are still red colored.

greets,

[edit] Table?

Because there are so many PDF-warez out there, is it possible to make it into a comparison table? just like the one they have for comaprison of email clients. Much appreciated.--sin-man 09:01, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] cleanup comments

I agree. Software for developers - libraries, tools etc - is completely different from software for end users. IMHO this page should cater for the majority of people who come to this page. I would guess these will probably be end users who wouldn't know a library if it stamped on their toe.

Plus some of the library software listed here is peculiar. If you search for SharpPDF on google you get 14,400 entries. Search for iText and get 710,000. There are other libraries missing with greater or fewer numbers of results.

Of course google results are not a perfect metric of relevance but they do demonstrate that there are issues here. I would suggest that in the absence of other metrics this might be a good one. After all it is demonstrable and easily verified.

I would suggest that the libraries be listed at the end. I would suggest that all the entries in a particular category should be listed roughly in order of google results just to give some idea of relevance. What do others think? Rollinghills 04:42, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

The library software is confusing and at the moment really just pads out the Windows section. Library/Development should be a subsection at the bottom of each Operating System section. Connectionfailure 20:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Foxit

Is Foxit Reader an adware or simply a freeware?

Foxit goes to Foxit Reader via a redirect page, they are one and the same thing and we should change it to go direct.
Foxit Reader has a number of fixed ads displayed on its toolbar which reminds users of other Foxit products and the program's features. They can easily be removed from the toolbar in the options and in any case have no capability of 'reporting back' via the internet. It is certainly not adware in the normal sense. Dsergeant 14:06, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Foxit, like Adobe, produce a range of PDF software including a free-of-charge viewer and commercial additions. The article could reflect this. At the moment, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader go to the same place too, and the treatment, one could argue, should be the same. Notinasnaid 07:05, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Foxit ain't free! You need to try or buy something else, like an eBay membership or apply for a credit card, then Foxit "pays" for your software.

Free software isn't free if you have to buy something else to get it.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.105.25.201 (talk) 18:19, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

The offer you mention allows you to get the Foxit Pro version and some of their other non-free products under a special arrangement (and I agree it is not free as you say). But Foxit Reader itself remains a totally free product and is not part of that arrangement. There seem to be some Wikipedians trying to dispute that...

Dsergeant 20:25, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GsView

There is no explicit mention of this software. I find it better than the alternatives, but clunky in its own way, I am not sure where to place it in the article. Multiplatform nagware, basically, but not crippled. Page rendering is not quite as clear as adobe, but usable and much faster / lighter. Has some neat conversion features as well. Does more than just view PDF's.

[edit] Cool PDF Reader

Should this be added? Supposedly the smallest reader available, and free too.

Cool PDF Reader

[edit] How do I convert FROM pdf?

There's a bunch of closed-source stuff out there, from fly-by-night freebies to expensive. I'm looking for the right solution - open source if it exists, if not, a solid closed-source product - something cheap or even free but usably good. This article should help me at least list the options, but it doesnt.

The answer is... "With great difficulty". You can convert to an image. You can sometimes convert to text. With effort, you can usually extract the image pieces. But accessing the full internal structure, correctly, to convert to whatever, is very hard.-68.236.103.195 14:42, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

You can convert to image formats by viewing the pdf with any viewer, doing a screen grab, and pasting into any graphics program. Also, PDFCreator is a free tool with many relevant features. You can convert pdf to png, tiff, ps, or even to pdf, and control the resolution and compression parameters of the conversion, with this fake "printer driver" approach. But how to convert to html, or otherwise get effective access to the internal structures? If pdf is now an open standard, this should not be so hard. -69.87.203.19 12:21, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

What about the InDesign plug-in [PDF2ID] ? Does that have a place in this article? By the way, Preview in Mac OS X can convert PDFs to graphic formats as well. Connectionfailure (talk) 05:04, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] online pdf tools

This article needs a section for "online pdf tools".

PDFescape is one. Free to try, but limited to 1MB pdf files. It does seem to be usable, but is unable to actually edit the underlying existing pdf content -- only able to overlay stuff on top of that.

freepdfconvert is another. Only does import/export. No stated size limit. Its strength seems to be that it can import from over 100 file formats! But it has a very limited number of export file formats. And it does not seem to able to handle pdf to pdf (compression) tasks. A quirk is that the output is supplied in zip format. 7zip did not open, but winzip did. -69.87.202.171 01:24, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree about adding the new section, but the software that actually does the conversion for you is quite possibly already listed here. Those sites just provide a web-based front end for a PDF engine. Connectionfailure (talk) 04:54, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] No free usable editor

There are no FOSS programs that really let you edit the base content of a PDF, it seems. Not even any free programs. The PDF format is so complex that it is really almost impossible to manipulate, despite being in theory an open format. The content is mostly ASCII, but the structure is so complicated that does not do you much good. A tool like pdftk lets you "uncompress" the pdf to a more pure ASCII. Notepad doesn't like the line endings, but it looks good in WORDPAD. In theory, you could now edit with a binary editor -- if only you could understand the structure. PDFedit is 3MB, and easy to unzip. But it depends on cygwin, which is very complicated -- unless you already have experience with cygwin, it is not worth trying this; PDFedit is a power tool for extreme experts. All it does is give you access to the internal PDF file structure. Which is so complex, you will not actually be able to do anything. -69.87.202.45 01:26, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Downsample

If you have a large PDF that you want to shrink by reducing the graphics resolution/quality, the term for this seems to be "downsample". But there seem to be no free programs available to do this. Only commercial programs called PDF Optimizer. If you know of any free way to do this, please tell us! -69.87.202.45 01:30, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] downsample by hand

Although there seems to be no free tool for downsample-shrinking pdfs, it can be done in a multi-step process with free tools. A pdf can be re-fried by conversion to ps and then back to pdf. Sometimes this can result in greatly reduced file sizes, sometimes they get bigger. It takes much experimentation. It can all be done with ghostscript. But the pdftops component of xpdf seems preferable for that step. This approach described here: [2] and here [3] Do you know a better free way to downsample pdfs? -69.87.200.8 00:05, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PStill transforms PDF to PDF

PStill is notable for offering PDF to PDF optimization/compression/transformation, which no other free tools do. PStill is cross-platform proprietary but partly free. The Linux version is free for non-profit use. The Windows version is free but watermarks pages until paid-for registration. Is Pstill included in any Linux live-CDs? -69.87.204.214 23:37, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] PDF Tuner

"ORIS PDF Tuner is a full editing environment for PDF and PostScript files. It can open customer-supplied files, allow for a full range of last-minute corrections, and output print-ready pages in all major file formats. ORIS PDF Tuner provides a complete array of page editing and creation tools, including image retouching, linework and text editing and full control over print-related page and object attributes. (Available for Microsoft Windows (2000, XP and 2003) and Apple Mac OS X.)"

"Oris PDF Tuner, from the German developer CGS, is pitched as a sophisticated layout editing program that can open PDFs and other common document files. It can pre-flight them, edit them with a full range of pre-press tools and then re-export them as “clean” PDFs via Acrobat Distiller, or as other pre-press formats. At £1,100 this is something of a bargain – in 2002, its predecessor, Oris Page 4.2 cost £2,650.

The most direct equivalent is Dalim’s Litho which, like PDF Tuner, is a full-function page assembler that can import and edit PDF or PS files and re-export them as clean PDFs or other formats. Prices range from £1,800 to £20,000 for the top Litho 64 Pro version. Another main rival is OneVision’s Speedflow Suite, which costs around £6,300 in an equivalent configuration. At Print 05, Artwork Systems also announced that it is working on a PDF editor codenamed Neo, which it says will be priced around the £7,000 mark."

Sounds like a good power tool. Too bad it costs $2,000. -69.87.200.196 12:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Online PDF view

We need a whole section on "how to view PDF files without installing any software" -- how to be able to just view a PDF online.

The first choice might be, if google has cached the material, you might be able to get a google html view. Usually just the text, usually not well formatted -- but better than nothing. Is there any way to explicitly access this google tech, for just a single online PDF that they have not already processed?

Samuraj Data AB hosts a free online conversion service:[4]

  • This is an online viewer, with which you can view PDF and PostScript files as browsable images and Word documents as web pages. Given a URL on the net or a file on your computer, the viewer will try to retrieve the document, convert it and show it to you. No plugin software is required.

It works, but it may always convert everything to bit images.-69.87.204.80 18:25, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Low-level editing

Tools the allow low-level access and modification of the internal PDF file structure:

  • PDFedit - free, requires Cygwin or Windows. A work-in-progress.
  • Enfocus Browser - free, requires Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader).
  • PDFGlobal COS level editor - $100, requires Adobe Acrobat (not Adobe Reader).
  • PDFTron CosEdit - stand-alone, Win NT-Vista, $100. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.87.202.139 (talk) 21:48, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Embedded compressed raster images

It is my understanding that raster images in PDF files can be compressed with a variety of algorithms, such as JPEG or JBIG. There are a number of tools (including Adobe Acrobat) which allow to extract these images as full resolution bitmaps, but I have not yet seen a tool that preserves compression. The decompression-recompression process is of course lossy and will diminish the image's quality. It would be a valuable addition to the article to include such tools if they exist or to discuss that (and why?) they don't. 149.217.1.6 10:52, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] please consider for adding

I'am not experienced in Wiki editing, so please correct my entry.

  • It might also be worth mentioning in the Mac OS X section that the OS itself provides a PDF export function to any program capable of printing. It's not in the same class as Acrobat but it's worthy of inclusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.149.211.163 (talk) 18:52, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
I believe it's because Mac OS X uses cups to do this, which is already listed. Connectionfailure (talk) 05:07, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] PDF Password breakers?

Why isn't there a listing of these useful pieces of software? This page, "List of PDF software" seems very appropriate. CapnZapp (talk) 13:37, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Because nobody added it. If you create the section, it would be there :) --MP 12 (talk) 02:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] PDF4Free for converting to PDF

Looking at the Revision history, someone removed my entry from this article: List of PDF software. The entry was for PDF4Free, a free virtual printer for converting any file to PDF.

  • PDF4Free is a free software using savepdf, RedMon and Ghostscript for making PDF files from any Windows application capable of sending data to the printer. It works by installing as a redirected printer port.

What was the reason for your action in removing this entry? Please explain.

EyeMD T|C 15:41, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

There were a number of edits made to the article around the time when you added PDF4Free in which another user had deleted many other entries. I'm sorry for accidentally deleting yours, too. I'll be more careful in the future. — EagleOne\Talk 17:48, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I have added back the entry and refined the language. EyeMD T|C 17:57, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Is Ghostscript an "Editor"?

In the Editor section, the article lists:

Ghostscript – viewer, creator and converter

But Ghostscript describes it mostly as a converter. Which is it? A full-featured editor in which one could open a PDF document, edit it, and save the resulting file? Please clarify, thanks. 129.219.26.199 (talk) 16:03, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Similarly, the article says:

Inkscape – open, edit and export documents

But Inkscape describes it mostly as a vector graphics drawing program, so it doesn't sound like this is a PDF document editor either... right? 129.219.26.199 (talk) 15:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)