qpdf VS TCPDF

QPDF is a CLI tool that performs content-preserving transformations on PDF files. We have another tool for managing files!

Given how well Preview.app and Safari work for viewing >99% of PDFs I actually encounter in the wild, this article makes Apple's engineering decisions look good.

It also confirms many suspicions I've had over the years that have led me to, e.g., running all PDFs from questionable sources through VirusTotal before viewing on platforms where I wouldn't normally run antivirus software.

The original article also confirms my suspicions that this step is inadequate:

Because the Launch action can be considered as a danger- ous feature, we conducted a large-scale evaluation of 294,586 PDF documents downloaded from the Internet, in order to research if there are any legitimate use cases at all. Of those documents, only 532 files (0.18%) contained a Launch action. While none of the files was classified as malicious according to the VirusTotal database, we conclude that the Launch action is rarely used in the wild and its support should be removed by PDF implementations as well as the standard.

Incidentally, the Launch action is still present in the most recent version of the PDF standard[1], with only OS-specific launch parameters deprecated (which include passing arguments to the launched executable, so eliminating the deprecated feature is still a significant security gain).

Finally, I'm both personally and professionally curious about how the non-DoS examples in this articles may apply to non-viewer PDF tools and libraries like qpdf[2] and Ghostscript's original and recently reimplemented PDF interpreters[3].

[1] https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/

(registration required, but at least the base standard is available at no cost; sadly, important incorporated standards like ISO 21757-1:2020 [ECMAScript for PDF] are not)

[2] https://qpdf.sourceforge.io

[3] https://ghostscript.com/blog/pdfi.html

I know you're talking about GUI editing, but I've found libqpdf[1] incredibly useful for making programmatic PDF edits with minimal (typically no) structural disturbance.

[1] https://qpdf.sourceforge.io

Solved this. So the string which we were concerned about depends on the time, which is why it changes everytime a new document is generated with the same source PDF. it is a meaningless string really. from the documentation, it gives this explanatin. To be sure, i raised an issue with the guys at QPDF and they were quick to answer the question too. The explanation theyve given is even more clearer.

Hi, this is my first Emacs package! It provides a transient wrapper for the qpdf command-line tool aimed especially at users of pdf-tools or at least DocView. With it one can, for example, remove/reorder/split/rotate pages of a pdf file, merge pdf files, remove annotations, and apply a range of transformations to a pdf file. See the qpdf documentation.

There are some here, as test files in the qpdf library: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/tree/main/qpdf/qtest/qpdf

(I wrote a low-level PDF parser and ran it over the PDF files that happened to be present on my laptop—just regular ones—and ran into some files that (some) PDF viewers open but even qpdf doesn't. I say "even" because qpdf is really good IMO.)

If you're comfortable handling the (typo)graphical aspects of the PDF yourself and have the ability to consume a C++ library, I've had good experiences using the Apache-licensed qpdf[1] library to handle the low-level structural aspects of the PDF standard. It's particularly convenient when your application requires structure-preserving integration of existing PDF content.

Simple example applications, each completed in 2–3 days, both in C#, using C++/CLI to integrate libqpdf:

1. Overlaying fixed-format text on pre-existing blank PDF form pages, ensuring the content of each distinct form page is embedded exactly once, and that all necessary assets (fonts, images, etc.) from the blank form PDF pages are included in the output PDF.

2. Losslessly combining a sequence of PDF, TIFF, and JPEG images into a single PDF with bookmarks pointing to the first page of each source file and existing image compression maintained where possible. In this application, only the source TIFFs were anything other than arbitrary (i.e., the TIFFs were more-or-less baseline images coming from a small number of scanning systems, but the JPEGs and PDFs came from all sorts of different applications).

[1] https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf

Use qpdf https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf

I was looking for a way on macOS to batch remove the user password from a bunch of PDF files that had the same password. I found the easiest way was to use qpdf with the following command:

Generating PDF documents out of your app's HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly stood up to my evaluation in terms of efficiency (minimal footprint) and ease of implementation was DOMPDF.

Leveraging Laravel for PDF generation involves utilizing its built-in features or integrating third-party packages. The framework supports popular packages like dompdf and TCPDF, making it easy to implement PDF generation with minimal effort.

TCPDF has full support for rendering an EPS into a PDF.

It can be fussy.

https://tcpdf.org/

Idk what’s the big problem. Maybe it’s just something like https://tcpdf.org ? Using that for years.

Depending on if this is a web-based project or not this suggestion might not be suitable. But the last few projects like this I did that were web-based I have used Google Charts with TCPDF. I rendered the charts on the page as a "print preview", and since TCPDF supports basic HTML composition I saved out the charts as generated images and submitted them to the server which generates a PDF. Bit convoluted but that was what I came up with in a hurry.

Running a headless browser to render HTML is a resource intensive task. If you only need to generate simple documents, you're better off using a tool that generates PDF directly. In the old days we used FPDF and its successors (TCPDF was the most popular). Both seem to have recent releases. There's also mPDF , that seems to be another child of FPDF.

You may want to look at a PDF library (Python/PHP/Perl/Java, etc.) You can do all you mention with a lot of flexibility. tcPDF comes immediately to mind, there is also a Python port. If you want to learn a language, i recommend python. Learning how to make a basic program when it is something that you want, and you know what you want is a great way to learn.

I would also look at dompdf and tcPDF, they would have very advantages if you intend to revise/reprint your documentation.

The original site still has it available for download, but most importantly, a ton of examples and documentation, that while I haven't tried the github version, probably works based on the same as the old.