I am a math professor with a scanned exam grading workflow that I hacked together as Bash scripts using various open source command line tools. I feed all the exams through a sheet-fed scanner, decode bar codes to identify problems and students, add radio buttons for entering and tracking scores (0-6 per problem), and create PDF "books" per problem for grading and annotating.<p>Having grad students help grade paper is a consistency nightmare: It's look once, never look back. Instead, after each of several provisional passes I recreate the PDF "book" for that problem, with a chapter for each score, and students randomized within each chapter. In the same spirit as "checking your work lets you work three times faster" this is actually both more consistent and faster that a single pass over paper. Almost all of my attention is on the math, which I'm good at, rather than locating problems and finding again the ones I know I misgraded, which I'm not good at.<p>Then each student's exam needs to be extracted from these problem PDFs, scores recorded, and annotations frozen.<p>There are cloud services for grading. They're hopelessly primitive, with cloud lag. Like a gamer, I used to reject wireless mice because of the lag. I reject these services. I can grade everything myself faster than using a team of grad students, with the right local tools.<p>The PDF format is a morass. My hats off to anyone who will work with it. There are many evolutionary layers and no formal specification or verification; one tests a PDF by seeing if most programs accept it.<p>It's time for me to rewrite my grading system in a modern scripting language, so others could use it. I prefer Ruby, but that's mainly to stave off boredom when I'm not using Haskell. I can use Python. This would permit a more robust workflow, such as adding late exams in mid-grading without losing grading in progress.<p>I can't find documentation for Borb, to check off the list of features I'd need. I suspect from this being a one-person project that I might need to continue to patch together external tools.
Haven't tested this lib, however be careful before including it in your project because of its license (it is dual licensed agpl/commercial). This means that you can use it only if your project is GPL or else you need a commercial license.<p>On the other hand, the reportlab pdf generation library (which is what I actually use) offers a permissive language in its open source version (and a commercial reportlab plus version), so it can be included in all kinds of projects.
Some books starts counting pages after the table of contents and so the pdf page number and the book page number are not in sync.<p>I’ve seen some PDFs have the first few pages counted in Roman numerals and then “normal” numbers for the main content.<p>How do you edit an existing pdf to do that?
There are a few PDF Python libraries and open source programs out there, but as far as I can tell all lack one feature: signing. If anyone knows of a open source tool kit or library that can sign, I'd be most appreciative.
The README in the GitHub repo for borb is a bit of a better explainer than this landing page (especially for Python programmers).<p><a href="https://github.com/jorisschellekens/borb/blob/master/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jorisschellekens/borb/blob/master/README....</a>
This is awesome! I've been looking for something that could be a link between PDFs and Instapaper[0] for a while. This looks like it'll be perfect to build such a tool with.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.instapaper.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.instapaper.com</a>
I have a PDF of a hymn book that I want to convert to 2-up so I can use it that way on my reMarkable which only supports single-page display and not two-page spreads; but I <i>also</i> want all the internal hyperlinks (to and from a table of contents) to keep working. I haven’t found <i>any</i> software that seems capable of doing this (though I’ve only looked at FOSS; wouldn’t surprise me if something Adobe could do it). The closest I seem to have found is qpdf which <i>might</i> be able to do it with some programming effort.<p>Is that sort of thing going to be in scope for this library’s editing capabilities? (“Editing PDFs” is such a broad, open-ended thing.)
So how does this compare to the python bindings of mupdf? Which IMO is the most featureful module to manipulate PDFs in python (I'm a bit buffled by all the comments that something like this didn't exist before).
So, are there decent lower-level (e.g. C++ or even C) libraries for doing this, which this library wraps? Or does this actually do the nitty-gritty PDF innards itself?<p>As for myself, I've not had to automate work on PDFs, luckily; for manual manipulation and annotation I've found Xournal++ sort of useful (<a href="https://xournalpp.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://xournalpp.github.io/</a>). Inkscape can also be used with some questionable PDFs.