Re: Module Proposal: PDF Mod

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

2010/2/19 Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>

On Thu, 2010-02-18 at 19:39 -0800, Gabriel Burt wrote:
> I'm not exactly excited to enter a possible flame fest when I'm happy
> doing my hacking and having users find me and tell me they like the
> results.  But, in case others agree GNOME could benefit from this, I'm
> proposing PDF Mod for inclusion in GNOME 2.30.

Too late for GNOME 2.30, the proposal ended on October 26 last year,
see:
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentynine

> Purpose: a simple tool for doing basic manipulations of PDF documents.
>  It can rotate, move, remove, and extract pages, merge documents, edit
> their basic metadata (title, author, etc), and extract images.  Future
> feature scope includes being able to change page sizes, and possibly
> do imposition (prep for printing).

I'd say that although useful[1], it doesn't really fit with what people
expect from the default applications on a Desktop.

I love PDFMod, I find it very useful ad hope to one day see it grow to be a powerful PDF editing tool that retaining it's intuitive simplicity and elegance. I am though not convinced either that this is desktop material, it would help if we had some better idea of what kind of user PDFMod aims to please and what use cases we are aiming at addressing.

E.g. I have often found myself reading slides or books in evince and pages of ads are inserted, blank pages or itemized lists being added over several slides which is useful during presentation but when reading the slides often can be annoying. In these cases it would be very useful to be able to call up PDFMod from evince and simply remove them. This doesn't though sound like a sufficiently normal scenerio to warrant presence in the default desktop. 

David