Comment by SpacemannSpiff
13 hours ago
Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel?
13 hours ago
Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel?
> Every time someone reinvents the wheel, it becomes a little rounder.
Not sure if this particular library is an improvement, but even if it serves nothing but the author’s enjoyment, or education, it’s a win.
It makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing.
And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.
It’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”
The server component is under GNU GPL: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-license/
In case anyone gets confused, PDFTk Server is just the name for the CLI tool, which hasn't been updated in 10y+ (and annoying to compile due to newer GCC versions removing GCJ). The pdftk provided in various distros (incl. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS) is pdftk-java, a 3rd-party pure Java port of the original tool.
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This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.