I have a large set of PDF files, each of which contains three unnecessary pages at the end. I was originally trying to create a solution based on an answer I found on askUbuntu and another StackOverflow question, but pdf-stapler apparently doesn't support the "r" notation that pdftk did, e.g. if I try pdf-stapler del myFile.pdf r4-r1 outputFiles/myFile.pdf or pdf-stapler cat myFile.pdf 1-r4 outputFiles/myFile.pdf, I get an error saying "Invalid range: r4-r1" for the first option and an output file with only page 1 for the second option.
Is there a way to do this with pdf-stapler?
The qpdf CLI command should be available in the Fedora repositories. It supports the "r" notation, so removing the last three pages from a file should work like this:
qpdf --pages myFile.pdf 1-r4 -- myFile.pdf outputFiles/myFile.pdf
Related
My overall goal is to make some PDF files conform to the PDF/A standard for archival purposes. They fail one requirement, namely that some glyph mappings map to 0, which they should not.
My usual strategy was to use an old software called "Pdfedit" that could decode PDF-Files, all the byte-streams would then be human-readable, edit the relevant part of the PDF containing the glyph mappings, and open the file with Adobe Acrobat that automatically re-encoded it.
Now I have some PDFs that cause "Pdfedit" to crash upon opening. I tried using PDF-Parser but its output cannot be re-encoded by Adobe Acrobat.
Also, the relevant parts used to look like this decoded:
/CMapType 2 def
1 begincodespacerange
<00><04>
endcodespacerange
5 beginbfchar
<00><0000>
<01><0000>
<02><263A>
<03><0000>
<04><0000>
endbfchar
endcmap
But now I use the following command python3 pdf-parser.py -f -n /path/to/file.pdf > dump.txt and inside dump.txt the relevant part looks like this:
b'/CMapType 2 def\n1 begincodespacerange\n<00><04>\nendcodespacerange\n5 beginbfchar\n<00><0000>\n<01><0000>\n<02><263A>\n<03><0000>\n<04><0000>\nendbfchar\nendcmap\nCMapName currentdict/CMap defineresource pop end end'
So it is a bytestring and any linebreak is rendered literally as \n. The txt file that contains this cannot be interpreted as a PDF by Adobe Acrobat.
I have now also realized that many elements such as %%EOF are delimited by ''.
The true issue is how to get an Acrobat-readable output from pdf-parser.py, as the shell-command > does not work and stdout in the shell is also faulty.
I will try out a few things but could really need some help on this!
Answering my own question in case this is relevant for someone down the line.
Didier Stevens, the dev behind the pdf-parser, answered that his tool is not made for this. He recommended qpdf instead.
That was indeed the solution. Make sure you use the flag --stream-data=uncompress so that compressed parts are also accessible in the output. The command to use with qpdf is:
qpdf old_file.pdf --stream-data=uncompress --decode-level=all new_file.txt
You can output new_file also as .pdf. In any case you will be able to open it in the text editor. Once you're done applying the changes you wish to apply, you can change the ending to pdf and process it further with acrobat or any other conversion program.
I am a typographer working with many fonts that have incorrect or incomplete filenames. I am on a Mac and have been using Hazel, AppleScript, and Automator workflows, attempting to automate renaming these files*. I require a script to replace the existing filename of ttf, woff, or woff2 files in Finder with the font's postscriptName. I know of tools (fc-scan/fontconfig, TTX, etc) which can retrieve the PostScript name-values I require, but lack the programming knowhow to code a script for my purposes. I've only managed to setup a watched directory that can run a script when any files matching certain parameters are added.
*To clarify, I am talking about changing the filename only, not the actual names stored within the font. Also I am open to a script of any compatible language or workflow of scripts if possible, e.g. this post references embedding AppleScript within Shell scripts via osascript.
StackExchange Posts I've Consulted:
How to get Fontname from OTF or TTF File?
How to get PostScript name of TTF font in OS X?
How to Change Name of Font?
Automate Renaming Files in macOS
Others:
https://github.com/dtinth/JXA-Cookbook/wiki/Using-JavaScript-for-Automation
https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools
https://github.com/devongovett/fontkit
https://www.npmjs.com/package/rename-js
https://opentype.js.org/font-inspector.html
http://www.fontgeek.net/blog/?p=343
https://www.lantean.co/osx-renaming-fonts-for-free
Edit: Added the following by request.
1) Screenshot of a somewhat typical webfont, illustrating how the form fields for font family and style names are often incomplete, blank, or contain illegal characters.
2) The woff file depicted (also, as base64).
Thank you all in advance!
Since you mentioned Automator in your question, I thought I'd try and solve this while using that to rename the file, along with standard Mac bash to get the font name. Hopefully, it beats learning a whole programming language.
I don't know what your workflow is so I'll leave any deviations to you but here is a method to select a font file and from Services, rename the file to the font's postscript name… based on Apple's metadata, specifically "com_apple_ats_name_postscript". This is one of the pieces of data retrieved using 'mdls' from the Terminal on the font file. To focus on the postscript name, grep the output for name_postscript. For simplicity here, I'll exclude the path to the selected file.
Font Name Aquisition
So… running this command…
mdls GenBkBasBI.ttf | grep -A1 name_postscript
… generates this output, which contains FontBook's Postscript name. The 'A1' in grep returns the found line and the first line after, which is the one containing the actual font name.
com_apple_ats_name_postscript = (
"GentiumBookBasic-BoldItalic"
Clean this up with some more bash (tr, tail)…
tr -d \ | tail -n 1 | tr -d \"
In order, these strip spaces, all lines excepting the last, and quotation marks. So for the first 'tr' instance, there is an extra space after the backslash.
In a single line, it looks like this…
mdls GenBkBasBI.ttf | grep -A1 name_postscript | tr -d \ | tail -n 1 | tr -d \"
…and produces this…
GentiumBookBasic-BoldItalic
Now, here is the workflow that includes the above bash command. I got the idea for variable usage from the answer to this question…
Apple Automator “New PDF from Images” maintaining same filename
Automator Workflow
Automator Workflow screenshot
At the top; Service receives selected 'files or folders' in 'Finder'.
Get Selected Finder Items
This (or Get Specified…) is there to allow testing. It is obviated by using this as a Service.
Set Value of Variable (File)
This is to remember which file you want to rename
Run Shell Script
This is where we use the bash stuff. The $f is the selected/specified file. I'm running 'zsh' for whatever reason. You can set it to whatever you're running, presumably 'bash'.
Set Value of Variable (Text)
Assign the bash output to a variable. This will be used by the last action for the new filename.
Get Value of Variable (File)
Recall the specified/selected file to rename.
Rename Finder Items: Name Single Item
I have it set to 'Basename only' so it will leave the extension alone. Enter the 'Text' variable from action 4 in here.
I'm using inkscape to produce vector figures, save them in SVG format to export them later as "PDF + Latex" much in the vein of TUG inkscape+pdflatex guide.
Trying to produce a simple figure, however, turns out to be extremely frustating.
The first figure
is an example of the figure I would like to export in the form of "PDF + Latex" (shown here in PNG format).
If I export this to a PDF figure without latex macros the PDF produced looks exactly the same, except for some minor differences with the fonts used to render the text.
When I try to export this using the "PDF + Latex" option the PDF file produced consists on a PDF document of 2 pages (again as .png here):
This, of course, does not looks good when compiling my latex document. So far the guide at TUG has been very helpful, but I still can't produce a working "PDF + Latex" export from inkscape.
What am I doing wrong?
I worked around this by putting all the text in my drawing at the top
select text and then Object -> Raise to top
Inkscape only generates the separate pages if the text is below another object.
I asked this question on the Inkscape online discussion page and got some very helpful guidance from one of the users there.
This is a known bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1417470 which was inadvertently introduced in Inkscape 0.91 in an attempt to fix a previous bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/771957.
It seems this bug does two things:
The *.pdf_tex file will have an extra \includegraphics statement which needs to be deleted manually as described in the link to the bug above.
The *.pdf file may be split into multiple pages, regardless of the size of the image. In my case the line objects were split off onto their own page. I worked around this by turning off the text objects (opacity to zero) and then doing a standard PDF export.
If you can execute linux commands, this works:
# Generate the .pdf and .pdf_tex files
inkscape -z -D --file="$SVGFILE" --export-pdf="$PDFFILE" --export-latex
# Fix the number of pages
sed -i 's/\\\\/\n/g' ${PDFFILE}_tex;
MAXPAGE=$(pdfinfo $PDFFILE | grep -oP "(?<=Pages:)\s*[0-9]+" | tr -d " ");
sed -i "/page=$(($MAXPAGE+1))/,\${/page=/d}" ${PDFFILE}_tex;
with:
$SVGFILE: path of the svg
$PDF_FILE: path of the pdf
It is possible to include these commands in a script and execute it automatically when compiling your tex file (so that you don't have to manually export from inkscape each time you modify your svg).
Try it with an illustration that is less wide.
Alternatively, use a wider paperwidth setting.
I have used pdftk to change the "Info" metadata associated with a PDF. I currently have several PDFs with extraneous page labels and I cannot figure how to drop them. This is what I am currently doing:
$ pdftk example_orig.pdf dump_data output page_labels.orig
$ grep -v PageLabel page_labels.orig > page_labels.new
$ pdftk example_orig.pdf update_info page_labels.new output example_new.pdf
This does not remove the PageLabel* metadata which can be verified with:
$ pdftk example_orig.pdf dump_data | grep PageLabel
How can I programmatically remove this metadata from the PDF? It would be nice to do with with pdftk but if there another tool or way to do this on GNU/Linux, that would also work for me.
I need this because I am using LaTeX Beamer to generate presentations with the \setbeameroption{show notes on second screen} option which generates a double-width PDF for showing notes on a second screen. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in pgfpages which results in incorrect and extraneous PageLabels in these files (example). If I generate a slides only PDF, it will generates the correct PageLabels (example). Since I can generate a correct set of PageLabels, one solution would be to replace the pagelabels in the first examples with those in the second. That said, since there are extra pagelabels in the first example, I would need to remove them first.
Using a text editor to remove PDF metadata
If it is the first time you edit a PDF, make a backup copy first.
Open your PDF with a text editor that can handle binary blobs. vim -b will be fine.
Locate the /Info dictionary. Overwrite all the entries you do not want any more completely with blanks (an entry consists of /Key names plus the (some values) following them).
Be careful to not use more spaces than there were characters initially. Otherwise your xref table (ToC of PDF objects will be invalidated, and some viewers will indicate the PDF as corrupted).
For additional measure, locate the /XML string in your PDF. It should show you where your XMP/XML metadata section is (not all PDFs have them). Locate all the key values (not the <something keys>!) in there which you want to remove. Again, just overwrite them with blanks and be careful not to change the total length (neither longer, nor shorter).
In case your PDF does not make the /Info dictionary accessible, transform it with the help of qpdf.
Use this command:
qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable orig.pdf qdf---orig.pdf
Apply the procedure outlined above. (The qdf---orig.pdf now should be much better suited for
Re-compact your edited file:
qpdf qdf---orig.pdf edited---orig.pdf
Done! Enjoy your edited---orig.pdf. Check if it has all the data removed:
pdfinfo -meta edited---orig.pdf
Update
After looking at the sample PDF files provided, it became clear to me that the /PageLabel key is not part of the /Info dictionary (PDF's Document Information Dictionary), but of the /Root object.
That's probably one reason why pdftk was unable to update it with the method the OP described.
The other reason is the following: the PDF which the OP quoted as containing the correct page labels does in fact contain incorrect ones!
Logical Page No. | Page Label
-----------------+------------
1 | 1
2 | 2
3 | 2
4 | 2
5 | 2
6 | 4
The other PDF (which supposedly contains extraneous page labels) is incorrect in a different way:
Logical Page No. | Page Label
-----------------+------------
1 | 1
2 | 1
3 | 2
4 | 2
5 | 2
6 | 4
My original advice about how to manually edit the classical metadata of a PDF remains valid. For the case of editing page labels you can apply the same method with a slight variation.
In the case of the OP's example files, the complication comes into play: the /Root object is not directly accessible, because it is hidden inside a compressed object stream (PDF object type /ObjStm). That means one has to decompress it with the help of qpdf first:
Use qpdf:
qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable example_presentation-NOTES.pdf q-notes.pdf
Open the resulting file in binary mode with vim:
vim -b q-notes.pdf
Locate the 1 0 obj marker for the beginning of the /Root object, containing a dictionary named /PageLabels.
(a) To disable page labels altogether, just replace the /PageLabels string by /Pagelabels, using a lowercase 'l' (PDF is case sensitive, and will no longer recognize the keyword; you yourself could at some other time restore the original version should you need it.)
(b) To edit the page labels, first see how the consecutive labels for pages 1--6 are being referred to as
<feff0031>
[....]
<feff0032>
[....]
<feff0032>
[....]
<feff0032>
[....]
<feff0033>
[....]
<feff0034>
(These values are in BOM-marked hex, meaning 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4...)
Edit these values to read:
<feff0031>
[....]
<feff0032>
[....]
<feff0033>
[....]
<feff0034>
[....]
<feff0035>
[....]
<feff0036>
Save the file and run qpdf again in order to re-compress the PDF:
qpdf q-notes.pdf notes.pdf
These now hopefully are the page labels the OP is looking for....
Since the OP seems to be familiar with editing pdftk's output of dump_data output, he can possibly edit the output and use update_data to apply the fix to the PDF without needing to resort to qpdf and vim.
Update 2:
User #Iserni posted a very good, short and working answer, which limits itself to one command, pdftk, which the OP seems to be familiar with already, plus sed -- not needing to use a text editor to open the PDF, and not introducing an additional utility qpdf like my answer did.
Unfortunately #Iserni deleted it again after a comment of mine. I think his answer deserves to get the bounty and I call you to vote to "undelete" his answer!
So temporarily, I'll include a copy of #Iserni's answer here, until his is undeleted again:
Not sure if I correctly understood the problem. You can try with a butcher's solution: brute force replace the /PageLabels block with a different one which will not be recognized.
# Get a readable/writable PDF
pdftk file1.pdf output temp.pdf uncompress
# Mangle the PDF. Keep same length
sed -e 's|^/PageLabels|/BageLapels|g' < temp.pdf > mangled.pdf
# Recompress
pdftk mangled.pdf output final.pdf compress
# Remove temp file
rm -f temp.pdf mangled.pdf
Not sure if I correctly understood the problem. You can try with a butcher's solution: brute force replace the /PageLabels block with a different one which will not be recognized.
# Get a readable/writable PDF
pdftk file1.pdf output temp.pdf uncompress
# Mangle the PDF. Keep same length
sed -e 's|^/PageLabels|/BageLapels|g' < temp.pdf > mangled.pdf
# Recompress
pdftk mangled.pdf output final.pdf compress
rm -f temp.pdf mangled.pdf
I am writing a package using the GNU build system. The documentation hence is in the texinfo format. As a result, executing make converts the texinfo file into the info format, and executing make pdf automatically produces a pdf file.
In the texinfo file, I have something like this:
#verbatim
awk '{...}' data.txt
#end verbatim
However, in the pdf, the "basic" single quotes (U+0027) in the awk command above are transformed into "curvy" single quotes (U+2019) so that, if one does a copy-paste of the command from the pdf into a terminal, bash complains ("syntax error"). This forces the user to edit the command he just copy-pasted. Same problem occurs if I replace #verbatim by #example. I searched the texinfo manual but couldn't find a way to specify apostrophes. I am using texinfo version 5.2.
Karl Berry (via the bug-texinfo mailing list) told me to add 2 lines to my texi file (more info):
#codequoteundirected on
#codequotebacktick on
as well as add the latest version of texinfo.tex to my package.