pdfcpu VS mgmt

Slightly tangential: if you are hacking on PDFs, manually or otherwise, this is an incredibly useful tool: https://pdfcpu.io/ (not the author, just a user)

A really nice, stand-alone command line tool is pdfcpu.

https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

Check it out => https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/releases/tag/v0.6.0

I can report that the closest I've came before is with PDFMiner (https://pypi.org/project/pdfminer/) for Python. The benefit of this one is that it retains styling information, so that italics and the like can be retained, at least with some post-processing (I think one might need to convert certain CSS-classes to actual or tags).

The other option I have started looking into is the PDFCPU library for Go. It is a bit more low-level than PDFMiner, but one gets out very well structured info, that seem it might be possible to post-process quite well, for one's particular use case and PDF layouts: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

I also now tried the Marker tool in the OT, and it seems to do a reasonable job. It did intermingle some columns though, at least in some tricky cases such as when there were a round shaped image in between the two columns. One note is that Marker doesn't seem to retain styling like italics though.

Of course, the best way would be to solve it via the API without CLI. But this doesn't seem to work. https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/issues/122

This is a new provisioning tool built with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ that I hope both provides great value and also demonstrates the start of a new way to build certain kinds of software.

Thanks for reading!

I've looked briefly into this project before. Some ideas are similar to what I'm doing in https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ but the really weird thing is that I have no idea who's behind this language. A person? A company? A small group? Are they anonymous for some reason or am I oblivious?

I don't generally believe in orchestrators (they miss the point, things are not single computers and neither is the world) and so I have that feedback here but also for:

> Airflow/Cadence/Temporal/Databuilderframework?

Which don't really think about modelling non-centralized things.

This of course doesn't mean they're not useful, it's just that they don't have what I believe is a good long-term value proposition.

I'm incredibly biased because I'm working on programmatic, real-time modelling of distributed systems with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

The DAG concurrency stuff feels familiar to what I've been doing with our language, mcl. https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Our goal is NOT a general-purpose turing-complete language like this one is, but we do some amazing lock-free, DAG concurrency things to achieve the processing wins.

I don't think it's good news, but why is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to pay for open source.

Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves.

Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!

Individual here, not a company. We'd love contributors to https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Eventually decided puppet wasn't a good enough tool to be able to autonomously deploy and continuously manage such clusters. So I started working on this https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project. Not quite MVP yet, but trying to get there soon. Got distracted along the way with having to work real jobs (Red Hat, Amazon) to pay bills.

Yeah, that project is pretty much at the bottom of my list, unfortunately. My top projects these days are mgmt, klister, recursion-schemes, and hint... And that's already too much!

There are certainly faster alternatives out there (mgmt comes to mind) but then, they're not Ansible.