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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

Trying my best not to sound like a raving Linux zealot, but what you see as normal productivity stuff I may not have done... ever.

Converting a PDF to a png? Why? Maybe IrfanView could do that, it's what I've been using on Windows for any conversion since ACDSee went out of fashion...

I've never seen a GUI tool that works as flawlessly as pdftk. Yes, it's CLI, but it works better than anything I ever encountered.

Screenshots? You just need to find the right app, I'm not happy with the windows thing (I've been using Greenshot for a while and it's on par with whatever I use on Linux).

But yeah, my comparison is only Windows, I've never owned a mac. And maybe I'm on the completely other end of the spectrum in my perception of what "normal tasks" are.

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Have you never needed to annotate/sign a PDF? On Mac OS just open Preview (the sane default for PDFs), use the annotate tools. There's even a built-in UI for "scanning" a signature via the front-facing camera, the software automatically cuts out the background so you have a signature to drop on the page. Save and the PDF is signed. Trying to do this on Linux requires moving a mountain.

In KDE: - Double Click PDF, Opens it in PDF viewer "Okular" - Select "Stamp" Annotation Tool - Draw region to place stamp - View stamp properties and click to select image source - Select SVG file I always use that has my signature that I created using my wacom tablet. - Adjust placement if needed - Save file

Takes all of ~15 seconds. Don't see how that equates to moving mountains.

15 seconds and a wacom tablet. The killer part of the preview.app is that it uses the front facing camera to capture a signature, quite well if i might add.

I've only ever done this with my own signature (so, a one-time process), of which I have a scan and my workflow hasn't changed for 20 years, just the tools. as the other reply said, just inserting an image into a PDF is not a problem, and I still don't understand the use case of the camera. But in this case maybe I've had my signature available for longer than phones with cameras exist contributes to the fact?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe all the office work I've done in my life is simply different.

That’s because you’re not a “normal” office productivity user or even online creator working with just normal customers needing normal docs, files, and normal staff that you need to share normal stuff with.

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