Bye Bye Blogger

This blog is now closing and moving to Wordpress. This is due to Google’s arrogance in forcing everyone on Blogger to move to a bug ridden new user interface that they should have spent more time testing and fixing before they made it mandatory. Google has also been dictatorial in forcibly removing email notifications on Youtube recently. Hence we invite our readers to continue reading our new blog at http://nztechonverse.wordpress.com

This blog and all the existing articles will remain up for as long as Google decides not to remove it. We aren’t taking the step of migrating the existing blog to Wordpress but all new posts will be made there.

General computing update - week 34, 2020.

 Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID array. However I was eventually able to add it back into the array and it has worked properly ever since. The first disk has been added to the existing array which is currently a three disk mirror. As soon as mdadm has synced this disk completely, I can then remove one of the existing disks off the array and then take it out of the computer, as I need backup disks right now. As noted at previous article the disk array will be the same size as current. I am expecting to buy the second disk in about another month and install it in the same way so that when it is also installed, the old disks can be removed completely, and all without actually copying any files. Last time when I did an installation I manually copied the files, but that was mainly because I doubled the disks from 1 TB to 2 TB; this time I will be staying at 2 TB.

Another techical task I have been working on around the house is erecting a TV aerial on the outside of the house. This has meant installing a cable duct and two faceplates between the inside wall and the underside of the soffit to take the aerial cable. That was the hard part as running the cable through the duct was very simple as was putting the aerial itself up. The TV itself is wall mounted and the cable comes through directly behind it. As I am in a prime reception area, the aerial does not need actual line of sight to the transmitter – there is actually another house in the direct line, but the signal is so strong that there is enough signal to get a good picture on every channel.

A few weeks ago I had some problems with a new package-based version of Qgis that would crash every time I tried to run it, on more than one computer. I had to install a flatpak-based version of Qgis, although I could have also run it in a virtual machine. The project developers built a new release after several weeks and it started working again, as did the next edition. Due to the disruption, I have implemented an extra precaution of testing every new release on a VM before installing it onto a working computer.

Google has again heaped glory all over themselves by implementing an arbitrary and dictatorial change to the Youtube platform. As of last week, they stopped making it possible for Youtube to send out notification emails whenever a new video is uploaded or streamed onto a channel. This has left a lot of people, including me, very annoyed by the decision. It is similar to the nonsense of the new Blogger user interface that is badly broken and which has forced me to copy and paste all my posts from another editor like LibreOffice. As I am doing right now with this post. Contrast that with the approach taken by Wordpress.com with a new editor system introduced a few months back; it was pushed through, but they did a lot of consultation with their users. In this case, Google has just announced the changes, but if there are any issues, it’s a one way conversation filing a problem report, just like the way you cannot actually have a conversation with Facebook about bugs or problems on their platform most of the time.

PDF Editors For Linux

This post is brought to you by the new Blogger interface Google has forced on everyone! Which is dreadful! The only way I keep my sanity editing posts on Blogger is to create the post in a separate editor (LibreOffice Writer in this case) and then paste the completed article into Blogger. There is much angst in the Blogger users’ community over the broken functionality in the new interface and the fact it has been forced into use with what they believe to be insufficient testing. My experiences with it exemplify those experiences, but this is the only one of my regular blogs that is still hosted on Blogger, and the workarounds for me are sufficient until such time as they fix all the bugs.

Today’s post is about editing a PDF using free/open source software. The PDF format as we are generally aware has historically been an Adobe thing, and so has the main editor software package. Everyone knows and uses Adobe Reader on various platforms, but relatively few people use Acrobat, the expensive commercial package that can edit PDF documents. Hence, a few alternative solutions have been developed, and the abilities of these are improving all the time. Here are my takes on a few of them.

My particular requirement here is filling out a PDF form and inserting my signature. It’s fine to be able to fill out the form in Okular (KDE’s in house PDF viewer) but inserting a graphic is impossible. So I looked at some of these alternatives:

LibreOffice Draw is part of the LibreOffice suite and can read and edit PDFs as files made up of individual elements. In my brief examination of Draw, the main concern I had was that it would be able to output the document looking like the original after editing; it seemed to have difficulty converting all of the text to typefaces that would fit cleanly into the original format. Because of this, I have not explored Draw further for my particular requirement at this stage.

Inkscape is a well known graphics editor that has a lot of features and is one of a few favourite graphical editors I have installed on my computer. I haven’t looked very deeply into its capabilities because the major limitation I have observed so far is that it can only handle a single page PDF; there is no obvious way of working with multi page documents.

Most of the full editors that are available are paid only. PDFSam and MS Word 2019 are examples that are Windows only. I have no desire at all to spend money on any type of Windows computer, or even a virtual machine, just to run these solutions. PDFstudio is an alternative that is available on Linux. The Pro edition that is capable of PDF editing costs $129 to buy and is licensed for 2 computers. It would be interesting to evaluiate this product at some stage to see if it is worth purchasing in future. Master PDF Editor is another product I might evaluate, it just puts a watermark on each page but it might be possible to remove that with one of the free editors.

Scribus is a FOSS desktop publishing package that also can open PDF files. Version 1.5 which is currently a development edition and only supported on most distros as an AppImage. I found however it has the same issue as some other packages of being unable to render fonts in the previously filled out PDF form.

Ultimately for this particular situation, needing a quick and easy solution to create my PDF and get it useful for my requirement, I have used Gimp which will import each page as either a layer or a separate image according to a selection choice when opening the document. It imports the pages as graphics, but you can fill in a form in something like Okular, save it to a new document, and then inserting a signature as a graphic can be done in Gimp, then export each image to a new file and paste them into a new document and export it back to PDF. A complex process for just one form but it lets me send my document completely filled out complete with signature because Okular cannot do the insertion of a graphic into the appropriate place on a PDF. I think this Gimp solution will be the best short term but I will still be interested in evaluating other possibilities in future.