Tag: command line

Sometimes it can happen that PDFsam Basic doesn’t start and there is no error message or anything that could help you understand what is the issue.
Read more…

They are Windows launchers for PDFsam Basic, our free and open source application to split and merge PDF files.
PDFsam Basic is written in Java and requires a Java Runtime Environment to run (pretty much like a C# application requires .NET framework installed, a Python application requires a Python interpreter etc etc). Read more…

Hi,
few days ago we released a new version of Sejda and its command line interface. This new release has a nice feature regarding outline (bookmarks) handling during a pdf merge task that might be interesting for some of you. When you merge pdf documents, you can now tell Sejda what to do with the documents outlines, it can merge them as well (default behavior), it can discard them reducing the size of the merged pdf document or it can create a completely new outline with one entry for each merged pdf.
This is currently available using the sejda-console but it will also be included in PDFsam v3 and BTW I’m working very hard on the new version of PDFsam, I hope I’ll be able to give you something testable soon.
Enjoy

Hi All,
great news! After more then one year of development today we released Sejda!
You are probably asking “What the heck is Sejda?”. It’s a PDF manipulation layer written in Java. “uh?”. Ok, as many of you know I’ve been working on PDFsam for 6 years now and I realized at some point that the pdfsam-console (the component providing pdf manipulation capabilities to PDFsam) has some… mm… limitations.
Quoting Sejda FAQ:

I realized at some point that some of the design choices I made were unfortunate and the code base wasn’t inline with 2010 software development standards. PDFsam itself was/is working pretty well but maintenance was/is a bit of a hell so I made the choice, I started to rewrite the pdf manipulation logic with 5 years of experience on my shoulders and trying to keep a close eye on quality and best practices.

What are the advantages compare to the pdfsam-console?
Quoting again:

it has more features, it has a bigger team working on it (we are 2 now), it’s built trying to follow best practices from Joshua Bloch in Effective Java and Robert C. Martin in Clean Code, it’s easier to maintain and extend and it’s not tied to a single pdf manipulation library but it tries to take advantage of strength points of all of them

It’s not going to affect PDFsam in the short period but I’ll start to work on a new release using Sejda as manipulation library.

Now you may ask “why should I care NOW then?”. We developed and released a Command Line Interface together with Sejda called sejda-console. It provides a set of commands to manipulate PDF documents using all the features provided by Sejda and for all the ones of you using the pdfsam-console and brave enough to switch to the sejda-console, it may be a good opportunity to try it and give us back some feedback. To make it more interesting I have to say that the sejda-console provides some more functionalities compared to the pdfsam-console:

• crop
• pdf to tiff conversion (single or multiple output)
• pdf to jpg conversion
• text extraction
• split by bookmark level where the bookmark matches a given regexp

We really hope to have feedbacks, opinions and suggestions from you, as you always did with PDFsam. You can find a lot of information, download link, javadocs etc at the Sejda webpage.
Enjoy!

oh, of course Sejda is free and open source.

Hi everybody,
I just released the first stable versions of the branch 2. The new 2.0.0 and 2.0.0e are available to be downloaded. You’ll find some bug fixes, the context menu to add complex prefixes, the rotate pdf module, thumbnails with a slightly improved quality, modules are now in alphabetical order and the new console command ‘pagelabels’ to set page labels on a pdf document.
Enjoy
Andrea

Hi everybody,
new branch 1 versions have been released. With these versions you’ll find a pdfsam-console with file logging capabilities, the alternate mix pdf with a new ‘step’ option and the new complex prefix “BOOKMARK_NAME” for the pdf split module.
Enjoy
Andrea

Hi everybody,
I just released the new PDFsam versions. These versions come with a bug fixed (now PDF split feature should always manage bookmarks correctly), with a new “split PDF by bookmarks level” feature (thank you Carsten for sharing) and with a new console feature to let you rotate pages when merging PDF files (only a console feature for now..).
Enjoy
Andrea

The next PDFsam release (around Christmas) will come with the new pdfsam-console. Some new command (pdf decrypt, set viewer options on pdf and set transitions on pdf) will be added and it will be dual licensed (GLP and LGPL) to allow use in commercial software. It’s still open source but the LGPL is less restrictive and you can choose the license you prefer among GPL and LGPL.
Andrea