Alas Poor Erinaceus
(Not as scary as I look, I promise)
- 82 Posts
- 160 Comments
20·3 days agoNow that almost everyone on planet earth has a small camera with them at all times, it would have been really cool to have discovered some supernatural stuff, be it ghosts, Big Foot, Nessie, whatever (and someone still might, who knows?), but instead all we get is police brutality. 🙁
You could start your own . . .
9·6 days agoThe fact that Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic is so excited about Machado would seem to suggest that you are correct.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/maria-machado-nobel-peace-prize/684510/
(Mrs. Erinaceus says that The Atlantic is a make-work project for unemployed neocons).
I only recently found out that the Nobel Prize for Economics was not one of the original prizes, and it was created to give credibility to the theories of intellectual lightweights like Hayek and Friedman.
Thought that the Freedom Flotilla would’ve been the obvious choice.
2·7 days agoWell, I believe he’s from the Czech Republic . . .
1·8 days agoKind of what I was thinking too.
It may be a little rough around the edges, but I do think the project has potential, and I hope he’ll be able to continue developing it.
A rudimentary cut and paste from his site:
PDF4QT Unleash the power of PDF4QT: Your go-to open source PDF editor powered by the Qt framework. With a robust C++ library, intuitive PDF viewing/editing applications, and a handy command-line tool, PDF4QT streamlines your PDF interactions. Try it today.
About
Experience the power of PDF4QT: An open-source PDF editor designed for both Windows and Linux. This modern solution offers an unparalleled experience for viewing, editing, and rendering PDF documents for all users, as well as developers. Developers have access to a robust C++ library and a practical command line tool for seamless script integration. Regular users can enjoy our four applications packed with a wealth of features. The PDF4QT project is proudly hosted on Github and operates under the LGPLv3 license. Discover the future of PDF interaction with PDF4QT today.
Goals
As the principal developer behind PDF4QT, I have set the following goals for the project:
To create a robust foss pdf editor alternative to commercial PDF editors, opening up advanced PDF editing capabilities to all. To offer licensing terms that are more flexible than GPL or AGPL, making PDF4QT a suitable choice for both open-source enthusiasts and commercial users. To harness modern C++ features and the power of multicore CPUs, delivering a highly efficient PDF editing experience. To ensure PDF4QT is inclusive and accessible, supporting applications on both Windows and Linux platforms. I’m actively working towards the full integration of the standard PDF 2.0 to stay on top of the latest developments in PDF technology. While this is a work in progress, my commitment to this goal is unwavering. Recognizing the increasing prevalence of high-resolution monitors, I’m dedicated to ensuring PDF4QT supports 4K/8K monitors (high DPI devices) for a visually stunning user experience.Join me on this journey and experience the power of PDF4QT today!
Applications
Discover the power and versatility of PDF4QT’s suite of applications. These tools are designed to transform the way you interact with PDF documents, offering a comprehensive set of features for viewing, editing, manipulating, and comparing PDFs. Preview our applications in the screenshots section and unlock a new level of efficiency in your workflow. Here’s what we offer:
PDF4QT Viewer Profi: Go beyond basic browsing. This tool packs a punch with a host of advanced features, including encryption, document reading, digital signature verification, annotation editing, and even support for searching text using regular expressions. Turn pages into images, and enhance your PDF interactions with multiple available plugins. PDF4QT Viewer Lite: Simplify your viewing experience. This lightweight viewer offers essential viewing functions in a clean, user-friendly interface. PDF4QT DocPage Organizer: Take control of your documents. Manage whole documents or individual pages with ease. Merge documents into a single file, or split them into multiple ones. You can also move, clone, or add pages with a few clicks, all within an intuitive user interface. PDF4QT DocDiff: Spot differences effortlessly. This tool allows users to open two documents and receive a detailed list of differences. View these differences in a page-to-page window where they are clearly marked. Save these differences into an XML file for future reference.Experience the future of PDF interactions today with the PDF4QT suite of applications. Try them out now! Features of PDF open source reader and editor
Unleash the full potential of your PDF interactions with PDF4QT’s impressive lineup of features. Designed to cater to a wide spectrum of needs, these features will revolutionize the way you handle PDFs. Here’s what you can expect:
Multithreading Support: Harness the power of multicore CPUs for faster, more efficient PDF processing. Hardware Accelerated Rendering: Enjoy seamless, high-quality rendering with hardware acceleration. Encryption: Ensure your documents’ security with robust encryption capabilities. Color Management: Maintain the integrity and accuracy of your PDF’s color profiles. Optional Content Handling: Have full control over what content to display or hide. Text Layout Analysis: This feature allows for an in-depth analysis of your existing text, enabling the conversion of PDFs into text, thereby facilitating a more efficient editing and formatting process. Signature Validation: Verify digital signatures with ease and confidence. Annotations and Form Filling: Make your PDFs interactive with annotation and form filling features. Text to Speech Capability: Access your PDFs in audio form with text to speech conversion. Advanced Annotation Tools: Enhance your PDFs by adding annotations, images, text and more. File Attachments Management: Easily view and manage the list of attached documents in your PDFs and save them to your desired location. Optimization: Reduce file size without compromising quality with document compression. Command Line Tool: Easily access and control PDF4QT via command line. Audio Book Conversion: Convert your PDFs into audio books for convenient access. Internal Structure Inspector: Understand your PDFs better with a detailed view of their internal structure. Compare Documents: Easily identify differences between similar documents. Redaction: Safeguard sensitive information by removing it from your PDFs. Document Signing: Sign your documents digitally for authenticity and validation. …and much more! Delve into the world of PDF4QT and experience a new standard of handling PDFs. Test out these features today!Build
You should use Qt 6.4 or newer, and use the latest compiler supporting C++20. Tested compilers include MSVC, mingw, and gcc. Windows / Linux
To build this project, you will need:
Qt 6.4 or newer with CMAKE 3.16 or newer VCPKG package manager Compiler supporting C++20 (MSVC, mingw or gcc)Then, you can compile this project, dependencies are automatically downloaded via VCPKG. On Windows, you can also optionally create Wix project for .msi installer. Installation
An MSI installer is readily provided for MS Windows users, along with a ZIP archive containing all the necessary files for those who prefer to run the program without installation. Exciting news for Linux users – AppImage and Flatpak packages are now available, offering flexible and convenient installation options across a wide range of distributions. See the build information above if you wish to build the package yourself. Dive into the world of PDF4QT today, and transform your PDF interactions like never before.
Can you get to his github?
6·9 days agodeleted by creator
I don’t want to in any way denigrate the hardworking folks who work on WINE, but from personal experience, I have never gotten it to work with anything. I’ve actually had much better luck with VMs. I believe that WINE itself has a scorecard for how well certain apps behave with it, to wit:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=18332
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=20209
Neither of which sounds terribly promising, unfortunately.
You could probably run Affinity on VirtualBox, but that means still having to deal with Windows, and running a resource-intensive program on it that way can be sort of, well, rickety-feeling.
If GIMP isn’t missing any particular features you need, you may just want to steel yourself and get used to the new work flow. In any event, good luck! 🙂
If no workaround can be found, I may finally be able to get Mrs. Erinaceus switched to Linux…
@xorvixen@lemmy.ml: I’m not familiar with Affinity, so unfortunately I can’t speak to that. It looks like it’s not Linux compatible, but you could always run it in a virtual machine (which, if you’re not familiar with, sounds kind of scary and hard, but if I can set one up, I’m fairly confident that just about anyone else can too!).
There’s also Viva, which is proprietary, but does have a Linux version(actually looks to be more of an InDesign replacement, so scratch that).You can always go through what AlternativeTo recommends, and see what works best fot you.
What do you feel is missing in GIMP? If, by any chance it’s full CMYK support, I believe that Krita has that and possibly other features you may be looking for as well.
@ComradeMiao@lemmy.world: Yeah, I do feel that Linux comes up a bit short in the PDF editing department. Even though it’s proprietary, I do really like Master PDF editor, for which I believe there is a free version, but I do think is worth paying for if there’s room in your budget for it. Also, have a look at this.
I don’t know about games, but I have had the thought in the past that if there were really good alternatives to Adobe products (which for the most part do exist, at least for my needs) that people could quite easily ditch Windows if they wanted to and would never look back. Due to enshittification, I think it’s only going to become more and more intrusive over time.
Anyway, hope this helps!
Depending on what you need, I might be able to suggest some Adobe alternatives to you, having just been through this myself.
NO 🫨
Master PDF Editor is one of two proprietary apps I currently have running on my laptop, and I would definitely say it’s worth the price (although once in a while when they update they manage to mess something up, but will usually get around to fixing it eventually).
This was quite a long time ago, but I had a lot of issues with Okular, though I don’t remember what exactly (one thing was that if you changed a document’s location, Okular would lose all the bookmarks you added to it, but they may have changed it since then, IDK). Evince’s commenting features seem a bit rudimentary to me, but I’ve only used the one from the Mint repo, so there may be a newer version that’s better.
There’s also PDF4QT which is open source, but is kind of new and may be a bit rough around the edges, although it does look promising.
Since Mrs. Erinaceus is considering switching, I was going to try and steer her towards Mint, but since she’s a gamer and I’m not (I know, boring) perhaps this would not be the best choice? Please tell me more.