Quoting: aokamiSeemed like a nice Linux hex-grid advance wars, though not a fan of "USA will once again save the world" even if that's against a fantasy/sci-fi threat. I might support the game for the Linux work from devs nonetheless, I just hope the story gets an interesting plot twist.

Isn't the fact that what's attacking the USA is another USA enough of a twist already? Plenty of irony there: USA becomes the victim of the USA drive for aggression and acquisition.

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I've always felt that the only country that poses a really serious threat to the United States of America is . . . The United States of America. Not in this particular way, but still it's oddly a propos.

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Quoting: ageresPDF files aren't meant to be edited, and for creating e-books from scans there is DVJU. People sending you PDFs should send images instead.

Well they won't. How about I stand on principle and refuse to do my job?

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library GuyClose graphical viewer software because you can't wrangle the thing with another tool while you have the file open

I get your point about cli and it's valid, but FYI, this is not windows, you *can* modify files while they are open :) last I did this kind of work I could leave evince open with the file and it automatically refreshed it when I changed the file.

Oooh, that's interesting.

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Quoting: whizseTry ScanTailor [External Link], it's not an all-in-one tool, it doesn't do scanning, OCR or PDF output. But it is excellent for doing the intermediary steps. Cropping, deskewing, prepping for OCR etc. in batch mode, with a GUI.

It's a little bit fiddly the first time around, but it has quickly become indispensable to me when it comes to wrangling scanned books and documents.

Another suggestion, for batch cropping with a GUI, or any other image edits on large sets of files. Try Darktable. It's primarily for RAW images, but does jpeg just as well.

I'll have a look. Although really what I'm working with is generally files that are already .pdf when I receive them. It really seems like software on Linux for manipulating .pdf files is pretty limited--and of course Adobe never port anything to Linux unless they can do it in a half-assed way that leaves Linux a second-class citizen.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGIMP for cropping pages, one at a time, pdfshuffler for sticking pages together and so forth

Take a look at pdftk(1)

I looked it up. It's a command-line tool.
I don't want to be using more command line tools, I want to be using fewer of them--fewer tools period, in fact, I want to be using one piece of graphical software. Command line tools for fiddling with visual things is a fundamentally stupid idea anyway. The sequence then goes

Open graphical viewer software, look at visual thing, figure out what you want to do with it --> Close graphical viewer software because you can't wrangle the thing with another tool while you have the file open --> Use command-line tool --> Open graphical viewer software; discover that you didn't do what you wanted to do --> Close it again --> Use command-line tool --> Open graphical viewer software; maybe it worked this time, figure out the next thing you want to do with the visual thing . . .

This is a broken idea. And I can't even imagine how I'm supposed to crop pages I can't even look at while I'm cropping them. Just no. Maybe they're useful if you have ten thousand things and you want to do the same simple thing to all of them so you can use the command line tool to batch them, but that is not a normal situation.

I'm not familiar with your workflow, but if you are doing your own scanning simple-scan let's you crop and export to pdf (although I've never used it for documents larger than 40-50 pages myself so i'm not sure how prone it is to crash with larger documents). If you get your scans in image formats, i think convert will be also a fast way to to join them all in a pdf, and it's probably installed on your computer already if you have imagemagick on it.

I could scan things at home potentially, but the things I would scan aren't at home so it doesn't come up. If I go in to work to scan them, I can use Acrobat at work. So when I'm fiddling with scan files at home it's generally something I'm receiving (I got someone at work to do the scan, or I got a file via interlibrary loan, or a course instructor scanned it and sent it to me, or something) and it's already a .pdf.
So, nice ideas but not really applicable to my situation.

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Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGIMP for cropping pages, one at a time, pdfshuffler for sticking pages together and so forth

Take a look at pdftk(1)

I looked it up. It's a command-line tool.
I don't want to be using more command line tools, I want to be using fewer of them--fewer tools period, in fact, I want to be using one piece of graphical software. Command line tools for fiddling with visual things is a fundamentally stupid idea anyway. The sequence then goes

Open graphical viewer software, look at visual thing, figure out what you want to do with it --> Close graphical viewer software because you can't wrangle the thing with another tool while you have the file open --> Use command-line tool --> Open graphical viewer software; discover that you didn't do what you wanted to do --> Close it again --> Use command-line tool --> Open graphical viewer software; maybe it worked this time, figure out the next thing you want to do with the visual thing . . .

This is a broken idea. And I can't even imagine how I'm supposed to crop pages I can't even look at while I'm cropping them. Just no. Maybe they're useful if you have ten thousand things and you want to do the same simple thing to all of them so you can use the command line tool to batch them, but that is not a normal situation.

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Quoting: jo3fis

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: jo3fis

Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)

Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?

My thoughts exactly. Everyone needs to calm down.

I haven't actually noticed anyone foaming at the mouth. You want everyone stoned out on laudanum or what?

Well that would be a welcome improvement for a lot of people 🤣

How can we deploy this on a mass scale?

Maybe you need to calm down.

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Quoting: jo3fis

Quoting: einherjarAnd there the typical Internet Drama of these days is seen again (Twitter "outrage" etc.)

Calm down, he has an opinion and it is different from what the most people think about that topic. So what?

My thoughts exactly. Everyone needs to calm down.

I haven't actually noticed anyone foaming at the mouth. You want everyone stoned out on laudanum or what?

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Quoting: AciDNow, do the same with Excel and Powerpoint (and perhaps even Word).
No need for edge when you already have Firefox/Chromium, while on the other hand in a work environment, having Excel and Powerpoint is essential.

Depends on the work environment. I've never actually used Powerpoint at work in 30+ years. And I've been working from home for months and never had a reason to wish my LibreOffice Calc was Excel. I know there are features Excel has that some people need, but just to use it as a spreadsheet . . . nope.

Adobe stuff has actually been a bigger problem for me. Like wrangling .pdf files; I have in the end been able to do everything I needed to do so far without Acrobat, but it's been clumsy and I've had to use different things for different stuff--GIMP for cropping pages, one at a time, pdfshuffler for sticking pages together and so forth, and I actually ended up using a command line thing, ocrmypdf, to OCR a scanned file (to be fair to ocrmypdf, it worked like a charm). This is not an ideal situation.

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