Can anyone recommend an acrobat pro alternative?

[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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[loukash]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

version 9.50 is the recommended

Any specific reason for that?
Could v9.53 be the reason why your app doesn't work for me unless when processing your example PDF?

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[loukash]

1 minute ago, Lagarto said:

9.5.4 which is the latest at least on Windows

Yeah, I just noticed that there's a new Mac installer.
Anyway, I haven't booted into Catalina for quite a while now, so I haven't checked your most recent builds yet.

[Wosven]

Thanks @Lagarto,

I found bugs on Windows 7:

• the Pantone colour appears black instead of salmon.
• if I first test your file with a Pantone, and drag & drop or open another file without spot colour, the separations list doesn't refresh and keep on displaying the Spot plate (with Pantone numbers), resulting in an error if clicked.
• I can't check the 2nd page, since the arrows are greyed (and can't check with the previous versions of the app, getting the "This apps has expired. Please get a later version to continue testing." message. From memory, I was able to display the other pages in the previous versions...).

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[loukash]

5 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

I do not know exactly what is needed to keep the fucntionality but High Sierra was the minum to be able to use more moden XCode architecture when creating the user interface.

As already noted, while "nice-to-have", for many of us who are coming from the Adobe suite, this is more or less a non-issue because Acrobat X will install and work up to Mojave just fine. I'm barely using it for anything else anyway.
Although, during my Affinity transition of the past months, I've added a few custom PDF/X-4 to PDF/X-3 conversion filters to work around the flawed transparency rasterization issues. Oh yeah, and OCR for scanned documents; although the Acrobat OCR UI is annoyingly clunky at best and maddingly buggy at worst. (But then again, the apparently brand new Ghostscript OCR feature isn't available on El Capitan.)

[Wosven]

@Lagarto

Ok, you mean this is normal, and I understand why now.

About being able to check the 2nd page: sorry, bad memory!

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About checking 2 files, one with a Pantone (your test file), and another without (an add I can't provide, but your file modified to get only CMYK on the first page give the same result).

test_CMJN.pdf

 

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Using this file gave another sort of bug (?).

In a first test, I just replaced the samlon Pantone to orange, and it was displayed fine in your app.

But I decided it would be best using a CMYK version of the Pantone instead of another colour, so I modified again the PDF already opened in AD, and saved it again with the same name (test_CMJN.pdf), erasing the previous file.

Dragging or opening the modified file in the app didn't modify the display: it keeps on displaying the first version, instead of the new one.

I had to close and reopen the app to get the final display of test_CMJN.pdf

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[Wosven]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

...so if it shows black, it means that the app cannot access the Affinity spot color definitions.

Damn, another bug! I can't select any folder in the preferences (PDFOutputPeview_bug.txt).

I'm not sure if the app is supposed to use the "Spot Colors.csv" file by default, but when this file is opened in Notepad++, it's displayed as ANSI, saving it as UTF-8 doesn't make a difference.

The file using custom spot colors work fine. (I'll test later with one of my own).

 

You didn't updated the version in the about menu. Now, I'll stop being a pain and go to bed!

 

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[Wosven]

1 hour ago, Lagarto said:

can you check the filenames of spotcolor files on the French

They are the same, and I was able to locate them fine in the preferences, so now, Samlon color is Salmon in the preview.

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

1. The app seemed to have old .csv files in the release path which I suppose were automatically included in the release build.

2. I removed those files now (hope the removal does not break it now!). As a side note: in Notepad++ you need to convert explicitly to UTF-8 (or whatever) and then save

1. I just open the zip and paste the new app in the same folder after renaming the older one (no need now since older ones won't run). That's why there's older/other files in there, like the CSV for custom colors, etc.

2. Effectively, I usually use another app, but since it canbe tricky with UTF-8, I wanted to do it with NotePad++ and discovered I needed to convert before saving first. A really simple option is also to open the file in Windows NotePad, and select "UTF8" when saving as.

 

It's nearly perfect now, the spot colors in the list disappear if there's none, but the 0% value don't.

 

Last point: the preview doesn't update when opening/dragging a modified file, unless I close and reopen the app.

test_CMJN.pdf

Is displayed as:

Instead of this after modification:

It can seem unimportant, but since it's commom to check a file, find a glitch, go to the app to correct and save again to PDF, erasing the older one... it would be usefull to not have to quit PDFOutputPreview each time.

SumatraPDF will update the preview of a modified PDF, but I don't think we need your app to be as intelligent. Just to be able to reprocess a file as new when it's dragged/opened in it.

Thanks for your work!

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[Wosven]

@Lagarto

There's a problem, the updated file can't be downloaded.