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LondonSquirrel

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Everything posted by LondonSquirrel

  1. On a Mac you can just hold down the 'e' key and you will be offered a selection and then select the letter using the mouse or the number:
  2. Can you explain to me why this is so important? If I view a document or image in a web browser on my laptop or on my phone I expect a somewhat different experience. The same goes for printed documents. DPI on a screen is different from DPI on a printed page. I am curious what all the fuss is about with variable fonts. I have no experience with them. Thanks.
  3. Where's the nitpicking? I asked how American dictionaries handle the word 'Centre' as in 'Centre Street' in New York. Words and names... Many names in English derive directly from trades, and therefore we have smith and Smith, cooper and Cooper, fletcher and Fletcher, driver and Driver, farmer and Farmer, and so on. So what. A misspelling is a misspelling, no matter what. Whether a lemma is considered a name or a word is irrelevant.
  4. I can confirm this. I have abcfile.aphoto, it has a bent corner, and it appears in finder as 'abcfile' without an extension. It opens without problems.
  5. Then you misunderstand. Over a decade ago, Torvalds said that the Linux kernel was bloated. It has only got much worse since then. X11, or X desktops? X11 is not bloated - it has not changed much over the years. X11 desktops like Gnome and KDE, yes they are bloated.
  6. There is also the general problem of 'low exposure' of Affinity apps. Yesterday I had a quick peruse through DigitalArts magazine. There's some Corel Painter stuff, but other than that it's Adobe... Take a look at their online tutorials here: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials/. It's all Adobe, so much so that the magazine should be renamed 'Adobe DigitalArts' IMHO. Just looking briefly at their tutorials, it's apparent that the Affinity apps could produce work like those shown. I'm making a distinction here between tutorials about Adobe apps, and tutorials about producing digital arts. To be fair, DigitalArts magazine has reviewed Affinity apps, e.g. APub here: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/reviews/creative-software/affinity-publisher-review/. It got a very good review, but it's a one page article with a few hundred words. I've spent more time eating a Mars bar. There's no DigitalArts ecosystem of tutorials for Affinity. Affinity doesn't help itself either with its non-industry standard (i.e. non-Adobe) and not-public file formats. That's fine as far as it goes, but it means that other apps cannot interact with Affinity files. Basically to produce Affinity documents you need to have Affinity apps, while the same is not 100% true for Adobe documents (with caveats).
  7. 'file' is a UNIX command. Open a terminal and type: man 1 file man 5 magic Read these two documents and you will have a clearer understanding of what 'file' is, what it does, how it does it, and the structure of magic files. 😁
  8. A few points... The file command and its associated magic files have no bearing on file creation. The magic files are only used to detect what type of file you are querying. In short, the file command and its magic files have no impact on Affinity creating PDFs. file is not 100% reliable. I have seen this over the years quite a few times. As R C-R states, you should not manually alter the files provided by Apple. Unless you are in to that sort of thing. If a tool (such as file) reports one thing but you see something else, don't assume that the tool is right. PDFs are created by the Affinity apps by using a third-party application called PDFLib. That's normal - why write another PDF library when somebody has already done it and maintains it (for a fee)? I notice from the contents of the Briefpapier-AD.pdf file that you are using an arm64 Mac, i.e. an M1. Thinking aloud, I wonder if there is anything specific to Big Sur + arm64 + PDFLib which is causing you problems. I was bored so had a look at the PDF specification. I managed to find PDF reference version 1.7 on the Adobe site. I'm not sure if this is the most up-to-date version. It's 1200 pages and I'm not going to read it all. Whether a PDF is encrypted or not is indicated by certain (let's just say) key words: 'Standard is the name of the built-in password-based security handler. Names for other security handlers can be registered by using the procedure described in Appendix E.' I created a test file using LibreOffice, and exported it to PDF requiring a password to open it. This is what is embedded in the PDF: <</Filter/Standard/V 2/Length 128/R 3/O(Rp?$/?ʧ?Y??s=?/??!\\E??zR?c?{?)/U(?#???ר???j???)/P -1028>> That Standard 'key word' is not present in the Briefpapier-AD.pdf file, so whatever app/program/system/person is reporting that this file is encrypted is wrong. I did look for other possible handlers (according to Appendix E in the reference), and none is present (as far as I can see).
  9. How does the American English dictionary handle the word 'centre', given there is a Centre Street in New York? I have had much fun over the years pointing this out.
  10. Yes! Sometimes a knife is what you need, not a workaround.
  11. Perhaps those of us who need it could arrange a 'send Serif a pair of scissors' day. The scissor is mightier than the pen.
  12. Not wishing to nitpick, but the Qimage web site states this: 'Qimage Ultimate is high quality photo print nesting software for PC/Windows See below for suggested workflows when printing stand-alone, or printing directly from Photoshop, Lightroom, and Elements'. Presumably the Qimage company considers the built-in printing tools in Photoshop and Lightroom are not good enough, and presumably that is where they find most of their customers. I don't see a problem with having a separate tool to handle printing as it is such a complex task. Isn't that the reason why there are books devoted to printing digitally? I have a couple...
  13. Correct. But you should use the versions of the magic files that come with the version of file, in case the structure changes. It's unlikely after this length of time with file but not impossible. Because nobody added it. file is open source software maintained by one or two people (or one or two people seem to do the code commits). They do two of three releases a year. They cannot possibly know every single file type and sub-type in existence, so they depend on submissions (and preferably patches) from other people. The version of the pdf magic file which introduced the 'detect password protected documents' is this one: https://github.com/file/file/commit/629972a91e05fcad8a1b5d906344838539b5f7ab#diff-1d80c89187edc2a2fab5b3ef59fadc199e03d7c8319e7e41e2bd1f329c00fee7. The buggy version of the magic file was released in January 2020, and the fix in July 2021 - about 18 months later. Why did this not come to notice earlier? Because not all OS vendors update their versions of file + magic files when new versions come out (e.g. Apple). For those that do (e.g. FreeBSD), you would then need somebody using that OS to notice it as a bug (i.e. test a pdf, see that it is not password-protected when file reports that it is), then report it as a bug. Bug reporting is important. The bug itself was reported on the 19th of July 2021 and fixed 11 days later. Hence I wrote earlier I was looking first to see if this is a bug, and if it was I was going to submit a bug patch. I couldn't see a bug for this, so I went looking at the bug tracker in case there is somebody smarter than me (it occasionally happens 😁). It's not a bug in file, it's a bug in the magic file definition (which is pretty much what I guessed) that file uses. Note: there may be other bugs in file or the magic files. To get this into macOS, somebody at Apple needs to decide to update it. I commented that there is no reason why Apple should not update to later versions of file (+ magic files). But perhaps they do have their reasons to which I am not privy. It would be interesting to know which OS + file version + version of the pdf magic file the original poster's IT people use. But it's not important. Software has bugs.
  14. I've built the latest version of file, which is still 5.40. With the latest version of the associated pdf magic file (1.16) this is what I see on FreeBSD: [aaa@bbb:22:02:12:~/file] (505) % ./src/file -m ./magic/magic.mgc pdf* ps_pdfx4.pdf pdfdigihigh_noprofile.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7, 1 pages pdfusweb.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7 (zip deflate encoded) ps_pdfx4.pdf: PDF document, version 1.6, 1 pages [aaa@bbb:22:02:24:~/file] (506) % ./src/file -version file-5.40 # $File: pdf,v 1.16 2021/07/30 11:47:07 christos Exp $ So back to the original poster, this was likely not a password-protected file at all, but was most likely compressed in some way (or contained compressed data) that your service provider could not handle. <snide comment>Your IT guys should have looked into this a bit further. If a file is evidently not password protected, but their tools say it is, then they should look at the tool to see what is going on.<close snide comment>
  15. That's a broken version. I will call it broken as that is the file responsible for showing wrong information - i.e. the bug. The version with the fix is 1.16 2021/07/30 shown here: https://github.com/file/file/blob/master/magic/Magdir/pdf. The only difference between version 1.15 that comes with file 5.40 and the very latest version is this: < >8 search/512 /Filter/FlateDecode/ (password protected) --- > >8 search/512 /Filter/FlateDecode/ (zip deflate encoded)
  16. I looked into this a bit further, spent some time reading the source code for file to see exactly what it does and with a view to filing a bug report. I need not have bothered - this has already been reported as a bug and has apparently been fixed in a later version of file: https://bugs.astron.com/view.php?id=275.
  17. If you can open the pdfs without a password (as I can), yes. It is a bug in that version of file.
  18. Agreed, but the date of the contents of the file is from 2008: # $File: pdf,v 1.10 2018/05/23 22:21:01 christos Exp $ Basically Apple have not updated this utility in > 3 years. There is no reason at all why they can't, so it's a case of "won't not can't". The version supplied with Catalina is 5.37. The latest version produced in March 2021 is 5.40. I've just built it on Catalina, and this is what I see using the updated magic files: [xxx@yyy:19:53:51:~/Dev/file-5.40] (519) % ./src/file -m ./magic/magic.mgc pdf* ps_pdfx4.pdf pdfdigihigh_noprofile.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7, 1 pages pdfusweb.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7 (password protected) ps_pdfx4.pdf: PDF document, version 1.6, 1 pages Meanwhile the out of date version of file shows: [xxx@yyy:19:56:01:~/Downloads] (525) % file pdf* ps_pdfx4.pdf pdfdigihigh_noprofile.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7 pdfusweb.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7 ps_pdfx4.pdf: PDF document, version 1.6 As I said, file is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. It never has been, and I don't think the authors have ever claimed it to be. Anyone who says it's always accurate has never encountered a file crafted to make you think it is something else. 😁
  19. That's the same size and version I have on FreeBSD 13. If the original poster's IT guys used a version of file (or rather's file's magic file bundle) which returns that a pdf is password protected then that is what they would think it is. I don't know what is causing this to happen.
  20. file is not 100% guaranteed to be correct. It depends on what your magic files describe, actually to be more precise what is in a bundled up magic files. I don't have Big Sur. Can you check the size and contents of /usr/share/file/magic/pdf? My FreeBSD desktop has a more up to date (by roughly two years) and different (and larger) magic file for pdf including this line which is absent from the magic file on Catalina: 0 name pdf >8 search/512 /Filter/FlateDecode/ (password protected) And then you can see a difference: [abc@def:11:24:49:~] (504) % file ps_pdfx4.pdf pdfusweb.pdf ps_pdfx4.pdf: PDF document, version 1.6 pdfusweb.pdf: PDF document, version 1.7 (password protected) J.
  21. I have all three apps (two from the App store, one from Affinity direct) on Catalina and don't have this problem - no help to you, I know. How are you trying to start them? Are they in the Dock or do you open a Finder window and navigate to /Applications? What happens if you try to open them from Spotlight? J.
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