Mr. Picklesworth
August 13th, 2008, 03:28 AM
This is disappointing and fascinating at the same time...
Today I was tasked with adding a raster image to a PDF file. We did not have the source files.
"Easy", I thought! Just download OpenOffice 3 since it has a PDF import extension, import it and edit it within OpenOffice. A long tale of half-missing 64-bit support led to deep frustration, (I admit the jury is still out there) at which point I switched to KWord. KWord imported the file... and it came out blank. This is normally a very colourful PDF with lots of writing.
Some muttering, mumbling and feeble attempts to get OO working somehow led me to Inkscape. It opened the PDF without stumbling. Everything looked exactly right, and all the structure was intact.
I did some more fiddling, this time with GIMP, to get the logo (a raster image with white background!) fitting into the PDF. Every attempt led to aliasing and resizing was hopeless.
...Then I remembered Inkscape's Trace Bitmap function. I dumped the image into that, set it to layer my vectors by colour (4 colours)... and it was done -- WORKING perfectly -- in seconds. White background was removed, flawlessly and with no aliasing because the lines making up the actual logo simply became traced green coloured paths. The logo went from looking awful to looking beautiful, all automatically.
The final output looked just like before and had a smaller file size.
This served as a powerful reminder to me that should enhance my future productivity by an order of magnitude: Big office suites with word processors are almost universally useless. For charts and tables, I can use a spreadsheet. For letters, a simple text editor with spell check never fails. Alternatively, something simpler than Microsoft Office, at least, like Abiword -- also an ideal candidate for big documents since it has a more streamlined interface, designed so that the user follows a single path towards producing a document instead of there being a million conflicting ways to do so. (One can argue that MS Office is better at making big documents organized, but one has to hunt deeper than its interface's obvious to find out how -- often the time he learns the correct way is too late). It can also be argued that LaTeX is superior to all of those, since it properly keeps formatting out of the way while still doing it...
For producing any kind of flashy printed document, what we need is clearly not a "word processor", but Inkscape with a publishing focus. (Eg: More prominent text tool and multiple pages).
It has clearly succeeded where all others have failed: It does the right thing without hesitation.
Today I was tasked with adding a raster image to a PDF file. We did not have the source files.
"Easy", I thought! Just download OpenOffice 3 since it has a PDF import extension, import it and edit it within OpenOffice. A long tale of half-missing 64-bit support led to deep frustration, (I admit the jury is still out there) at which point I switched to KWord. KWord imported the file... and it came out blank. This is normally a very colourful PDF with lots of writing.
Some muttering, mumbling and feeble attempts to get OO working somehow led me to Inkscape. It opened the PDF without stumbling. Everything looked exactly right, and all the structure was intact.
I did some more fiddling, this time with GIMP, to get the logo (a raster image with white background!) fitting into the PDF. Every attempt led to aliasing and resizing was hopeless.
...Then I remembered Inkscape's Trace Bitmap function. I dumped the image into that, set it to layer my vectors by colour (4 colours)... and it was done -- WORKING perfectly -- in seconds. White background was removed, flawlessly and with no aliasing because the lines making up the actual logo simply became traced green coloured paths. The logo went from looking awful to looking beautiful, all automatically.
The final output looked just like before and had a smaller file size.
This served as a powerful reminder to me that should enhance my future productivity by an order of magnitude: Big office suites with word processors are almost universally useless. For charts and tables, I can use a spreadsheet. For letters, a simple text editor with spell check never fails. Alternatively, something simpler than Microsoft Office, at least, like Abiword -- also an ideal candidate for big documents since it has a more streamlined interface, designed so that the user follows a single path towards producing a document instead of there being a million conflicting ways to do so. (One can argue that MS Office is better at making big documents organized, but one has to hunt deeper than its interface's obvious to find out how -- often the time he learns the correct way is too late). It can also be argued that LaTeX is superior to all of those, since it properly keeps formatting out of the way while still doing it...
For producing any kind of flashy printed document, what we need is clearly not a "word processor", but Inkscape with a publishing focus. (Eg: More prominent text tool and multiple pages).
It has clearly succeeded where all others have failed: It does the right thing without hesitation.