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Reconstituting a document from PDF using QuarkXPress 2016
For better or worse, Adobe’s PDF has become the de facto standard for most electronic archival and many other purposes. Unfortunately, it was never designed to enable you to reconstitute an original,...
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QuarkXPress 2016, Storyspace/Tinderbox, and HTML5
Half way up our stairs hangs a miniature replica of the Rosetta Stone, with the same rather uninteresting royal decree of 196 BCE written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek. It...
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Les PDFs sont merveilleux: but why is Safari loading them in French?
When Safari downloads a regular file, progress is reported in its popup download pane in plain English. That’s fine. But every time that it downloads an Acrobat PDF for display inline using Adobe’s PDF...
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Tax chaos looms
January is invariably a harsh month in the northern temperate zone. Not only do we usually experience our coldest weather with some of the shortest days, but here in the UK it is the last month in...
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Podofyllin now exports Rich Text and delves deeper into PDF documents
Having added support to my Rich Text editor DelightEd to open PDF files as Rich Text, I promised to add a matching feature to Podofyllin, so that you can export the whole of a PDF in Rich Text format....
View ArticleUpdate to fix printing and PDF issues in DelightEd, and a new product page
If you’ve tried printing from my Rich Text editor DelightEd, or saved a document to PDF format from it, you’ll have discovered its rough edges. Printing respected the appearance of a window, so if you...
View ArticlePodofyllin 1.0b16 now prints each of its views
As promised earlier this week, here’s a new version of Podofyllin which handles printing properly, at last. It can print any of the following views: the main window PDF view, any PDF window, opened in...
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Printing without tears in Dark Mode (and exporting to PDF)
Early in January, I detailed here two issues with printing in apps developed using the main Cocoa frameworks which make up AppKit: the first is that printing in Dark Mode propagates that appearance to...
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Inside the Mueller Report with Podofyllin: can it be deredacted?
Thanks to a tweet from Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, within a few minutes of the Mueller Report being made available for download, I had a copy on my Mac. The first thing that I did with it...
View ArticlePDF without Adobe: 20 Outlines, Bookmarks and Preview
From the outset, PDF has been intended to be cross-platform, application-neutral, and completely compatible. It does a remarkable job considering its age and complexity, but there are some features...
View ArticleLast Week on My Mac: Taking text further
In less than a generation, we have moved from shooting still images on film to high-definition movies on mobile phones. Yet over that same period, the electronic ‘replacements’ for books have only...
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PDF without Adobe: 21 PDF Annotations
If you use two or more apps which can annotate PDFs, you’ll know how confusing they can be, not only in the tools which they provide, but in the way in which different types of annotation are...
View ArticleUpdates for DelightEd and Podofyllin
Here are new versions of my Rich Text editor DelightEd and my PDF reader and analysis tool Podofyllin, which include code integrity (signature) checking with each launch, and the new automatic check...
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PDF without Adobe: 22 The fractious PDF
Most PDFs open reliably in all respectable viewers and editors, from Preview and my own Podofyllin to Adobe Acrobat Pro. Every once in a while, though, you come across one which doesn’t behave: the...
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PDF without Adobe: 23 The nightmare of forms
One of the most useful extensions to the original concepts behind Adobe’s Portable Document Format, PDF, is the PDF form. First introduced as an extension to annotations, many government and corporate...
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28 years after Unicode, we still can’t handle accents: PDF + macOS + URL =...
Nico had a simple task: copy a URL from a PDF document and paste it into a webpage for publication on a site. When he opened the PDF in Adobe Acrobat, that worked fine, but open the same document in...
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PDF without Adobe 24: Accessibility with PDF/UA
You can criticise Apple for many things, but one of its saving graces has been its sustained championing of accessibility. This isn’t a particularly large or lucrative market, but a very important one:...
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PDF without Adobe 25: If at first you don’t succeed, try OCRing again
Marc had quite a good-quality scan of a book written in French, which had undergone Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to turn its contents into accessible text. But something had gone badly wrong:...
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Colour fonts are upon us – in Mojave at least
It has been quite a few years since the first full-colour characters arrived in fonts, in the form of emoji, dating back to OS X 10.7 and 10.8, in the Apple Color Emoji font. These break the tradition...
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PDF Without Adobe: 26 a PDF protection racket
For PDF to be a truly universal document format, it needs encryption and a mechanism of controlling what the reader can do with a document. Much of this has inevitably been driven by commercial users...
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