On Windows and Mac machines, it is not much too troublesome to add text or drawings (this sort of as signatures) to PDF documents, but [Mansour Behabadi] located that on Linux equipment, there did not look to be a enjoyable way or a simple tool. Being an enterprising hacker, [Mansour] set out to fill that hole, and the way it works beneath the hood is delightfully hacky, in fact.
The key point standing in the way of building these types of a resource is that the PDF format is a sophisticated and twisty point. Earning a normal-objective PDF modifying resource capable of inserting hyperlinks, notes, photographs, or drawings isn’t specifically a weekend challenge. But [Mansour] didn’t enable that prevent him he leveraged the fact that resources presently exist on Linux that can examine and generate PDF documents, and tied them all alongside one another into what was at 1 position “a horrific patchwork of tools” which inspired the identify pdfrankenstein.
The instrument is a GUI that uses Inkscape and qpdf to change a PDF web site to an SVG file, established it as a locked track record, then permit the consumer insert any annotations they want, using Inkscape as the editor. Just after adjustments are made, the program removes the background, overlays the annotations back on to the originals, and exports a ultimate file. Annotations can thus be anything at all that can be done in Inkscape.
Curious about these and other resources for managing PDFs? We’ve shared some applications and methods when we earlier covered dealing with the PDF format in Linux.
