Re: [NTG-context] PDF viewer poll

On 10/15/2019 10:12 AM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

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On 15 Oct 2019, at 06:42, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

Thank you all for you valuable insights so far! I’ll compile them to a wiki page and also complete the list in my upcoming book.

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Am 2019-10-14 um 11:17 schrieb Hans Hagen :

When developing pdf specific code (like last months) I do use acrobat reader and an older acrobat x (which keeps telling me that it wants to be updated but the update fails) ... both have their different issues. Acrobat X has some validation on board and one can introspect the file (and fonts) to some extend but in the end it's often still trial and error.

Do you know any other tools for PDF debugging? Those few I know of cost four to five figures or were plugins to very old versions of Acrobat

Most of my PDF debugging is done using 'mutool clean’ (especially with the -d switch) and textmate / diff.

qpdf also has something like that (with comments of where the objects come from) and using both tools in parallel can normally reveal issues there are catches: for instance some tools don't really use the xref table but just run through the objects so finding issues in the xref (and compressed object tables) is a bitch but luckily it seldom needed Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | www.pragma-ade.nl | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------