Hi everybody,
first of all merry Christmas 
I decided to write this post to keep you informed about the plan for the next release of pdfsam. After some thoughts I decided to rewrite pdfsam for the same reasons why me and Eduard developed Sejda completely rewriting the pdfsam-console. Here is a short list of the changes you can expect in the next release:
- I’ll move the source code from SVN to Mercurial, most probably on BitBucket where I already have some project and I’m very happy with it.
- I’ll mavenize the project to make it easier for developers to contribute and because I can’t stand those huge Ant scripts anymore.
- Unattended installation
- No more .pdfsam directory to store preferences
- Sejda as core manipulation library which means a couple of new plugins (TIFF conversion, text extraction..) and some minor improvement to the existing ones.
- I’ll most probably use some OSGi framework to improve modularity and it seems to perfectly replace the current plugin system. I’m still investigating this.
- Finally a completely new layout. Someone once told pdfsam looks like a Ferrari engine on a old Lada chassis.. well, I agree and I’ll try to make it simpler, more usable and good looking.
It’s going to take a while but I hope the final result will be a pleasant surprise for most of you.
Andrea
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 pdfsam 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 single tiff conversion
- pdf to multiple tiff 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,
sorry for the late update but I finally added the MacOS dmg version of pdfsam 2.2.1 (basic and enhanced).
Enjoy
Hi everybody,
I released versions 2.2.1 basic and enhanced, available in the download section. In these release you’ll find some library upgrade (JPodRenderer, the thumbnails generation library, among the others) and some bug fixes (most inportant one bug affecting the bookmarks handling during the merge and split). You can find the complete list in the changelogs here.
The ICEpdf thumbnail generation has been upgraded as well to the latest version.
MacOS dmg will be available soon.
Andrea
Hi everybody,
I just want to remind you that you can use the Wiki as a valuable source of information about pdfsam, especially the HowTo section where a lot of simple tutorials can be found. If there’s something you want to add or share, simply login to the Wiki using same user and password for the pdfsam forum and just add what you want to add.
Andrea
Hi everybody,
as some of you may already know by the forum, a couple of days ago McAfee antivirus reported an infection in the pdfsam-starter.exe. I’m sure it’s a false positive and I already reported it to McAfee attaching the sources of the pdfsam-starter hoping that they will fix this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime I released a patch containing a new pdfsam-starter.exe which fixes an issue on Windows 7 64bits (bug #3050730) and that McAfee likes more than the previous one. The patch can be found here, I also included the sources so anybody can check them or even compile the starter. I really hope to have a fast feedback from McAfee and I was also thinking about dropping the pdfsam-starter executable (that is the only Windows executable included in the package) in next releases, leaving there only the .bat script to avoid any further trouble with the wonderful world of Windows/Virus/AntiVirus.
Andrea
I just released a new version of the ICEpdf thumbnails generation library with a fix for bug #3072732 (it wasn’t handling correctly pages rotation). You can find the link in the download section.
Andrea
Hi, I just released an updated version of the ICEpdf thumbnails generation library using ICEpdf 4.1, it can be found in the download section. You can find instructions on how to plug it in pdfsam here.
Andrea
Hi everybody,
it has been a while since I wrote my last post and I want to keep you informed on what I’m working on. Since release 2.2 I started to work on a new project that will be the core library for pdfsam 3. This new project is a java library based on the pdfsam-console but written from scratch. The reasons why I’m rewriting (..and decoupoling the shell interface from the core library) the pdfsam-console are many but the most interesting for you users, I think is that this new library will be, hopefully, the base for an online version of pdfsam. Of course I’m still supporting pdfsam on the forum and I’ll fix bugs opened in these months and nothing changes for pdfsam at the moment, I just wanted to let you know what’s going on.
Andrea
Hi everybody,
finally I uploaded the new dmg archives for the 2.2.0 and 2.2.0e versions of pdfsam. You can find the link in the download section for the basic version and in the enhanced forums for the enhanced version.
Enjoy
