Can anyone recommend an acrobat pro alternative?

[loukash]

@Lagarto, also a thought I had this morning: wouldn't it be better to start a new thread dedicated to your app only?

[v_kyr]

11 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Also it might be time to make an own Resources section thread entry for your efforts here, since this thread here is not that much particularly clear for your project!

 

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[loukash]

1 minute ago, Lagarto said:

version 1.0.0.3 with total area coverage and ink readings

Thanks!
Haven't even tested the previous version yet, as I'd need to reboot the Mac. Currently I'm busy in El Capitan, switching back and forth between Affinity & Schmadobe…

[v_kyr]

23 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

...as I am pretty confused yet with the way macOS tracks mouse events...

• Handling Mouse Events

You can easily implement a callback for handling mouse events on macOS. For moving the mouse cursor the only method you need to override then is mouseMoved, which informs the receiver that the mouse has moved. Each function call will update the position of the cursor node with the relative position of the mouse in the view. -  A tiny view extension in Swift would then look like this ...

// Mouse-based event handling
extension YourView {

    override func mouseMoved(with event: NSEvent) {
        cursor.position = event.location(in: self)
    }

}

Then you can define a tracking area, aka a region of a view that generates mouse-tracking and cursor-update events when the pointer is over that region ...

// Create a tracking area object with self as the owner
// (i.e., the recipient of mouse-tracking messages)
if let frame = view?.frame {
    let trackingArea = NSTrackingArea(
        rect: frame,
        options: [.activeInKeyWindow, .mouseMoved],
        owner: self,
        userInfo: nil
    )
    // Add the tracking area to the view
    view?.addTrackingArea(trackingArea)
}

That would be a Swift way here. - Though you probably meant instead to do that via C# then under MacOS (?).

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[v_kyr]

25 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

The good thing about C# cross platform solutions is that you basically learn to do it in Objective-C way, as well (even if not so useful anymore).

The majority of MacOS still has Objective-C code roots (thank's to NeXTstep/OpenStep), so it's anyway useful to know and learn some things about it. And since ObjC is language wise a superset of C, most people familiar with C language programming will probably feel more at home with it. - Of course Swift in contrast here offers the more modern language approach, but it always also depends on what you personally feel more comfortable with.

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[Kal]

I've been away from this thread for a while, but I see much has happened…

@Lagarto, absolutely legendary stuff, to get in there and actually make this app for everyone! I just downloaded the latest version, but unfortunately the app is crashing for me when I try and open any PDF. I have Ghostscript 9.50 installed in the usual place (/usr/local/bin/) and can confirm it is working to produce separations from the same PDFs. This is the error in the console, which probably isn't very helpful:

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (application.com.lagarto.pdfoutputpreview.PDF-Output-Preview.65202316.65202319[7782]): Service exited with abnormal code: 1

Any ideas what to try?

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[Kal]

8 hours ago, Lagarto said:

I have tested it on quite a small number of PDFs. Could you share the file your have tested (or just the extracted single page PDF extracted from it) so that I could check it in debugger (you can send me private message via forum so we can agree on the way of transferring the file).

Thanks, I've sent you a PM.

When it silently crashed on my production file (print-ready artwork with 2 spot colours) I tested a bunch of other PDFs, and the same thing happened every time. So I wonder if there's some other issue on my system.

8 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Which macOS version did you use?

I'm on macOS Big Sur 11.2.3.

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[loukash]

45 minutes ago, Kal said:

I tested a bunch of other PDFs, and the same thing happened every time.

I haven't tested the last version yet (currently still busy on El Capitan), but v1.0.0.3 on Catalina failed on any PDF as well.
As noted earlier, the installed Ghostscript separates my PDFs without a hitch when using my Automator plugin.

[Kal]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

It's more probably the app. It was developed and tested mostly on Big Sur, though. 

You could test with the simple file like one below, just to see that there is nothing wrong with the system. 

testonepage.pdf 9.11 kB · 2 downloads

You're right. That file of yours opens no problem, and the app works beautifully (when it's working). 😊 I've sent you my PDF as requested.

 

2 hours ago, loukash said:

I haven't tested the last version yet (currently still busy on El Capitan), but v1.0.0.3 on Catalina failed on any PDF as well.
As noted earlier, the installed Ghostscript separates my PDFs without a hitch when using my Automator plugin.

Ah okay. I did skim the whole conversation, but I can't recall what your Automator plugin does? I don't mind running Ghostscript from the Terminal, but the layering of seps provided by Lagarto's app would really take it to another level.

[loukash]

6 minutes ago, Kal said:

I can't recall what your Automator plugin does?

I haven't posted it for download yet.
In short, as in "Terminal bin/bash gibberish", it does primarily:

for f in "$@"
do
	/usr/local/bin/gs -q -sDEVICE=tiffsep -r300 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -o "$2"/output%d.tif "$1"
done

But it uses AppleScript to get the Finder selection and all the variables, and that still needs code polishing before I dare to publish it.

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[Kal]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

Here is version 1.0.0.6. It was related to spaces in the source file name. I created a routine that first copies the source replacing the spaces with underscores. Ghostscript is especially tricky with script-based calls on Mac as it cannot gracefully escape quotes and spaces (with backslash) …

On the command line (Bash or Zsh), I find it much easier to just enclose file paths in single quotes, rather than muck around with escape characters. With scripting, if you're storing your command as a string, you might need to escape the backslash itself before you can use it to escape another character in the actual command. It gets confusing—my tip, just go with single quotes! 🙂

So I can confirm that your app is working, so long as there are no spaces elsewhere in the path. If one of the containing folders has any spaces in the name, it still crashes.

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[Kal]

24 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Here is version 1.0.0.7 that should fix the problem with spaces in the path names.

Indeed it does! Great job Lagarto. Hey, it's not Acrobat Pro 😄 but it shows me those colour seps, which is what I really need to see. Thanks again for investing your time to make life easier for all of us!

🏆

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[Dazmondo77]

5 hours ago, Lagarto said:

UPDATE: A couple of other fixes added to attend the problem with mixed filenames.

Still bombs when processing a pdf - had the exact same issue with Packzview

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