Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/06/how-pdf-expert-is-changing-the.html
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As of 2008 PDF is no longer a proprietary Adobe format.
Which is nice, since I don’t want to give any money to the people who ripped off authors with fake encryption and put Skylarov in jail for telling people about it. No adobe products for me!
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I don’t have the luxury. But I also don’t pay for my Cloud account.
PitStop Pro is the shit for messing around with PDFs, though.
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Can we all just get in the habit of sharing source files for documents instead of devising ways to edit a file-type whose only inherent advantage is flattening and compressing? PDFs are getting bloated as shit to accommodate all this jacked-up workflow. Adding a digital signature, whatever, sure, but beyond that, I believe we can be better*
*may not actually believe we can be better.
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You would think the answer to this would be “yes”, especially when the PDF was obviously produced with professional software.
But you would be wrong… 
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I’ve built whole data-driven projects off of text scraped out of PDFs because no one even knew where the inDesign files were, much less source text, or some kind of structured dataset. I just get my bloomers all in a twist when I see products further enabling this behavior. It’s one of my most quixotic personal missions.
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PDF is a major attack vector and should be avoided IMO.
Oh yeah, I know the pain. “But it’s all right there in the PDF. Can’t you just use that?”
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Let’s all just go back to hand coding PostScript.
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My favorite thing is “Just one little change to this medical form.” that turns into 5+ changes, and at first you can try to move things around in Illustrator or Acrobat via PitStop. But at some point you just have to kill have a day rebuilding it in Indesign. Though I do get satisfaction of lining up all those boxes, and now with a native file, changes take way less time.
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That’s some pricey shit right there. I guess if you need what they offer on a regular basis, it would be worth it?
I’m with you on not having the luxury of avoiding Adobe products though.
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OH yeah, it is. Previous job paid for ONE License that a manager had, and we had to bug her anytime we had an issue that we couldn’t make work any other way. It is mighty powerful, though. Mighty powerful.
Luckily new job allows everyone a copy. Yes, if you aren’t setting up stuff for print professionally it is an expense probably not worth it. Freelance design and the like you can do what you need with the Adobe Suite.
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Nice! It’s like an old AD&D character sheet on steroids. I love stuff like that.
Where I work, we mostly do web design work, so PDFs are rarely ever needed. The few print jobs I work on I can make due with what Adobe provides, and if I need to rip a PDF apart because clients are clients for source files I use File Juicer.
For things like that form… yeah, I could see every tool you can get your hands on could help.
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That’s actually the only valid use of PDF I know of - formatting for paged printing. Grass roots political organizations and schools use it for flyers.
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That was my thought too! I do service and data tracking for the nonprofit that I work for, and it captures a lot of similar stuff. not coincidentally I’m writing a tabletop RPG based on our work, and will be hoping to recycle some of the infrastructre I’ve built for program tracking for the game backbone…
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as a graphic designer who mainly works in print design, PDF is a godsend for me. i will praise it until my last breath.
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Maybe that software can do more, I don’t know, but the built-in OS X viewer can already edit pdfs, add or remove images and text, merge pdfs or remove pages, etc…
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I’m contemplating PDF Expert for one particular use case.
I have a large collection of antique periodicals. I’ve been publishing them off and on, for my friends-- using finereader to handle the ocr, which is embedded in the pdf-- this makes indexing and translation easier. If I output to “Word”, it makes any OCR errors permanent, and screws up the layout.
example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RgoheBzzKbJ0Sop9hfxCDlRz_QOpPuvB/view?usp=sharing
If I had the windows version of finereader pro, I could edit the text before it was embedded–but unfortunately I use the Mac version, which has a different set of “premium” features.
PDF Expert supposedly lets you edit the embedded text…
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Seems like a gross violation of CBK-4.10
Luckily that’s not a ‘core competency’ or anything.
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