I'm trying to flatten annotations I make to PDF files in macOS Preview (El Capitan) to ensure that they cannot be modified. I especially want to ensure that redactions cannot be deleted or unhidden to reveal the text beneath. Ideally, I would also like to preserve the machine-readability and vector quality of the text.
Currently, I achieve this by exporting to .tif, then converting back to .pdf, and then OCR'ing with Abbyy FineReader Express. That's a bit ridiculous, but the final result is almost exactly what I want: permanent annotations and searchable/copyable text. It loses some quality though... and grows in size.
I'm comfortable with the CLI and I've got MacPorts installed and pdftk. I hoped that the pdftk "flatten" option would do the trick, but it does not. It only seems to flatten form fields.
Does anything else out there do this? I swear there was a way to do this on some old built-in imaging program for Windows 2000 or something. (but I'm ok not going back to that) :-)
I would settle for a command that rasterizes the file if and only if it:
did everything in one step
kept the file small
kept the file as a pdf
kept the file as almost as readable and pretty as it was before
The "Best Practice" for Redactions in PDF is to either use Acrobat's Redaction tool, or the (long time industry leader) Redax Acrobat plug-in for Acrobat (although that one is not made for MacOS, as far as I remember).
Of course, the export as picture and then run OCR over it does work, but you have to absolutely make sure that you also clean up the file(s) from any private data and metadata.
Note that with the "real" redaction tools, you have the possibility for smart searches, even involving Regular Expressions.
With Redaction, as with other safety and security-related issues, it is up to you to decide how much it is worth to you.
Use "Export as PDF" (in the File Menu) which seems definitely a proper way to do it (on 10.9.5).
It seemed that the way to make these annotations permanent is printing to PDF with Preview, but that didn't succeed.
I'm searching for a tool that will take a source directory and produce a single PDF containing the source code, preferably with syntax highlighting.
I would like to read the PDF on my phone, in order to get familiar with a code-base, or just to see what I can learn by reading a lot of code. I will most often be reading Ruby.
I would prefer if the tool ran on Linux. I don't mind paying for a tool if it is particularly good.
Any suggestions?
You could wipe something up yourself with Prawn and Ultraviolet.
PDF is no good for reflowing. You might like a html based solution better.
And in reading existing code, a lineair model is no good. You need to jump from one file to the other. A hypertext model with history would probably work best on the limited screen estate of a phone. It should borrow some features of the smalltalk IDEs (jump to senders, implementors).
For the UI, take a look at clamato
GNU source-highlight supports many languages and can output LaTeX in particular that can be converted to pdf.
The SciTE editor can export the currently edited file (with syntax highlighting) to PDF (and HTML, RTF, LaTeX and XML).
Alas, it doesn't have batch conversion capability, but IIRC somebody made a batch tool out of this code base.
I realize this is very late, but I wanted to do the same thing, except I wanted it for my tablet, which is a Galaxy Note 10.1 with a Wacom digitizer that I can use to annotate code. I found that one good solution is to use Doxygen to generate a PDF which will have hyperlinks and everything you would want in a PDF. For my use case, I would pair it with EzPDF on Android to annotate the code. This was also for the purpose of learning a new codebase. In the end I ended up not using the generated PDF but it was pretty usable.
I'm working on migrating some Flash files from AS2 to AS3, and I'm realizing that there are several pieces of text that I need to copy over and over and over.
Right now I have those pieces of text in an open notepad file, but I would love to have the ability to store those pieces in a clipboard so I can easily access them like by pushing something like CTRL+1, CTRL+2, etc.
Does anyone know of a good tool to do this?
Thanks,
If you have visual studio installed you can use that instead of notepad. Then you can copy multiple strings to clipboard and use Ctrl+Shift+Ins to paste them one by one.
Another alternative is Microsoft Office, here's a nice little write-up on their Clipboard utility.
It's also nice in that it's type agnostic, so you can clip multiple levels of text, images, whatever. I haven't used the Visual Studio version so I don't know how it compares, but I use it all the time.
I'm looking for a collaborative editor that doesn't suck :) And that at least supports Ruby syntax highlighting. Also, a developer and I will be using this to program, so Google Docs won't work.
In all reality, I just need a collaborative editor that has the concept of a project. Where both users see the folder structure of a project and thus see what the other user has opened and is editing.
Also, it would be ideal that both users have local copies of the data (none of this "You remote into me and don't get to keep the data when we're done" stuff) so that one can actively develop against each other's code.
Truthfully, I've found such an editor: http://www.n-brain.net/una_ide.html#features
But I'd really like to see if there's something else out there that's just killer.
I've tried ECF and Eclipse, and it seems SO promising, but NONE of the Ruby IDE's implement the very simple methods of incorporating ECF document sharing functionality into them.
So, does anyone actively use Collaborative editors? And if so, what's your setup like?
SubEthaEdit is an excellent collaborative editor. It allows multiple users to edit files simultaneously, and chat about it. So far it is the best thing I've found for this sort of thing.
Coda licenses SubEthaEdit and includes the same collaborative functionality. Coda also has a notion of a project including directory structure.
SubEthaEdit is quite the tool. I love it.
You seem to have two different questions there.
For Ruby on Rails, you probably want this one: Aptna RadRails.
For collaborative editor, I haven't tried any collaborative editor myself (other than SubEtha, tho not for actual collaboration). But if you haven't looked yet, here are some options you may wish to try:
Zoho Writer, which is a better Google Docs
Bespin, from Mozilla
beWeeVee Notepad, an off-stream online alternative
I got 'em all from AlternativeTo.net
Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac they call it) is pretty much feature rich
and supports collaborative editing as well. Its hard to beat that in feature list. See this list on wiki to do a comparison yourself. And best of all, its open source! Then there is BBEdit too but doesn't have collaborative editing.
Also see this original question for a comprehensive list.
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What software is recommended for working with and editing large XML schemas? I'm looking for both Windows and Linux software (doesn't have to be cross platform, just want suggestions for both) that help with dealing with huge XML files.
For Windows, I found Microsoft's own free XML Notepad to be a great simple to use editor with a nice selection of features. Used it for both reviewing my XML output when developing and editing broken iTunes' libraries. ;)
Requires .net 2.0
I may be old fashioned, but I prefer my text editor.
I use emacs, and it has a fairly decent xml mode.
Most good text editors will have decent syntax hi-lighting and tag matching facilities. Your IDE might already do it (IntelliJ idea does, and I believe Eclipse does as well). Good text editors will be able to deal with huge files, but some text editors may not be able to handle them. How big are we talking about?
I agree that your text editor is probably your best bet. I do know some people who swear by XMLSpy, if you need something that's tailored specifically for dealing with XML files in a visual way. I bet you could find some F/OSS work-alikse but I'm not aware of any.
FirstObject XML Editor. http://www.firstobject.com/dn_editor.htm
Its free, written in C++, optimized for working with very large xml files.
While it is relatively limited in functionality, it can load 100MB+ unformatted files in seconds, indent them and locate specific elements using the tree view. By using the 'Refresh' option you can also synchronise the tree with the text view.
It's in the UNIX spirit of having a simple tool doing a specific job very well.
You need at least a decent text editor as a baseline, emacs with nxml mode as mentioned before is a very good choice. However as the schema becomes larger and larger you may lose the overview, especially when you author an XML Schema document which can be very verbose. You'll need some sort of visualization: XML Spy is ok, Oxygen is great but expensive, but as it turns out, on Windows, you have almost all needed features in XMLPad which is freeware.
When you start editing instance XML documents (and even editing XML Schemas) you need on the fly validation against a schema and if possible auto-completion of attributes and elements. Emacs only supports on the fly validation and auto-completion with a relax NG based schema (but any XSD can be converted to a relax NG schema).
If you have any choice in the matter, consider using Relax NG as your schema syntax, it is much more readable and maintainable.
I work a lot with XML, and have found Oxygen to be a great editor. It's cross-platform and has a graphical schema editor, but since I use DTDs and not schemas, I can't vouch for the schema editor's quality. The rest of the editing package (such as the XML editor and XSLT debugger) is solid, so it could be worth a try.
Altova's XMLSpy is probably the best available. It offers different views of your data/schemas, XPath tools and produces good diagrams, among other things. It does cost quite a bit though. It's a mature product, so you don't tend to run into limitations as quickly as you do with some other tools.
Liquid XML is a pretty good, but relatively new alternative. It's a nice app to use and there's even a free version available! This is a tool worth keeping an eye on.
Both of these products have a handy feature which produces sample XML files based on your schema.
In contrast, Oracle's JDeveloper (based on Borland Jbuilder, I believe) tries to provide a decent schema editor, but falls short in that it sometimes produces invalid schema files. I stopped using it soon after noticing this.
I highly recommend checking out IBM's XML Schema Quality Checker. This command line tool validates your schema against WC3's XML Schema language. This is a good idea even if you've built your schema using another tool.
I use nxml-mode in GNU Emacs for editing xml, including very big files. And i use it for a long time - it quick, provide on-the-fly validation of xml , and provide completion functionality for tag & attributes names
The oXygen XML Editor a great IDE for Windows, bit expensive tho.
Altova's XML Spy is a great editor, but not necesarily the cheapest option out there.
I highly recommend Stylus Studio if you have any need for a long term broadly capable XML IDE. I've used it mostly for XSLT development but it supports development of almost everything XML related you would want to do. It's Windows only (very annoying).
I am using Cooktop (also available on tucows), and I'm very happy about XPath testing feature.
Cooktop is an editor and development environment for XML, DTD, and XSLT documents
Cooktop is a Windows application
Best of all, it's free!
Features
Color-coded XML, DTD, and XSLT editing
Check well-formedness and validate
Stylesheet testing with almost any XSLT engine
XPATH testing
Customizable "Code Bits" library
XML formatting via Tidy
Small download, small footprint
Open source XML editors examined - it is a little bit outdated though.
+1 for XML Spy, I've used both the stand alone product and the visual studio plugin, and I've been impressed.
In terms of FOSS, I use Notepad++
Recently I was editing XSLT files with Eclipse but for some reason Eclipse wouldn't do any auto-completion anymore. So I switched to Emacs's brilliant nxml-mode, and I'm not sure I'm going back. You get auto-completion that's really easy to use, and it's very fast. The only glitch is that you must provide a RELAX NG version of your document's schema, but there are tools out there that generate one for you from your DTD or Schema.
Check out http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=2061 for more.
For non-free software, I second the recommendations for OxygenXML.
I use Notepad++ as my editor. You can also add plugins for dealing with XML specifically.
XML Copy Editor - Windows and Linux
Fast, free, and supports XML schema validation.
Official Website
http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/
How to install in Ubuntu
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1640003