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Comment by patrickg | Hacker News Reader

QPDF is great! I use it heavily to analyze PDFs generated from other applications (PDFTeX, InDesign) to incorporate new features (such as spot colors) in my software (http://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) The command line I prefer is

    qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable in.pdf out.pdf

so I can view the result with less or a text editor.

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I use mupdf-tools' pdfclean command for that.

   pdfclean -d in.pdf out.pdf

However qpdf seems to have more features. The most interesting for me:

The QPDF library also makes it possible for you to create PDF files from scratch. In this mode, you are responsible for supplying all the contents of the file, while the QPDF library takes care off all the syntactical representation of the objects, creation of cross references tables and, if you use them, object streams, encryption, linearization, and other syntactic details.

If it's so great, why does it live on Sourceforge? Every time I see a link there I die a little inside.

Very limited audience? No marketing effort?

Destined to die in obscurity? Check.

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