Isophine

A blazing fast PDF imposition GUI tool written in C++ using Qt and QPDF. It allows scaling, rotating, translating, and clipping pages based on a predetermined dimension chosen by the user. The rendered pages are created by making a deep copy of XObject forms from the original PDF and then stamping them onto a new empty PDF document. This preserves utilities like text selection, searching for text, etc.

If you're interested in this project, please read the contribution section of this README.

Preview

preview-v010-1.mp4

Compilation

This project requires Qt6 and QPDF as dependencies for compilation. Please download them before compiling. Follow the commands below to compile the project. The executable should be present at ./build/src/isophine.

git clone --recursive git@github.com:Bubu-Droid/isophine.git
cd isophine
mkdir build
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Configuration

You can edit the app's configuration from within the app. It can also be edited by editing the .ini configuration file.

Linux path: ~/.config/isophine/isophine.ini.

Default Keybindings and Shortcuts

All of these keybindings can changed be from the app settings. The default keybindings are inspired by vim motion keybindings.

Keys	Description
n	Move to the next page
p	Move to the previous page
h	Move the page left by small amount
H	Move the page left by large amount
j	Move the page down by small amount
J	Move the page down by large amount
k	Move the page up by small amount
K	Move the page up by large amount
l	Move the page right by small amount
L	Move the page right by large amount
r	Rotate the page clockwise by small amount
R	Rotate the page clockwise by large amount
e	Rotate the page anti-clockwise by small amount
E	Rotate the page anti-clockwise by large amount
=	Scale the page up by small amount
+	Scale the page up by large amount
-	Scale the page down by small amount
_	Scale the page down by large amount
Ctrl++	Zoom the canvas in
Ctrl+-	Zoom the canvas out
Ctrl+V	Toggle thumbnail view panel
Ctrl+I	Toggle inspector panel
Ctrl+Q	Quit the application
Ctrl+H	Go to dashboard from editor
Ctrl+N	Create new project in dashboard
Ctrl+O	Open existing project from dashboard
Ctrl+,	Open app settings

Default Values for Other Settings Parameters

Key	Value
Translate small amount	1
Translate large amount	10
Scale small amount	0.01
Scale large amount	0.1
Rotate small amount	0.1
Rotate large amount	1
Horizontal lines count of bounding box	5
Vertical lines count of bounding box	3
Initial scale of bouding box	1
Default gridline color of bounding box	Dark blue

Tip

If your configuration file is malformed/corrupted, you may copy the default configuration file given below and overwrite the content of the current configuration file.

Default Configuration for `.ini` file

    [BoundingBox]
    HorizontalLinesCount=5
    LineColor=@Variant(\0\0\0\x43\x1\xff\xff\0\0\0\0\x80\x80\0\0)
    Scale=1
    VerticalLinesCount=3

    [Increments]
    Rotate\LargeAmount=1
    Rotate\SmallAmount=0.1
    Scale\LargeAmount=0.1
    Scale\SmallAmount=0.01
    Translate\LargeAmount=10
    Translate\SmallAmount=1

    [Keybindings]
    Movement\Down\LargeKey=Shift+J
    Movement\Down\SmallKey=J
    Movement\Left\LargeKey=Shift+H
    Movement\Left\SmallKey=H
    Movement\Right\LargeKey=Shift+L
    Movement\Right\SmallKey=L
    Movement\Up\LargeKey=Shift+K
    Movement\Up\SmallKey=K
    Navigation\NextKey=N
    Navigation\PrevKey=P
    Rotate\AntiClockwise\LargeKey=Shift+E
    Rotate\AntiClockwise\SmallKey=E
    Rotate\Clockwise\LargeKey=Shift+R
    Rotate\Clockwise\SmallKey=R
    ScalePage\Down\LargeKey=Shift+_
    ScalePage\Down\SmallKey=-
    ScalePage\Up\LargeKey=Shift++
    ScalePage\Up\SmallKey="="

License

• The main code is licensed under GPLv3.
• The GUI, which is built using Qt6, is licensed under GPLv3.
• The renderer, which uses QPDF, is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Contribution

Thanks a lot of showing interest in this project of mine. Please read what I've written below:

This is a very early release of the project. It's my first C++ project and also my first open source project. I barely knew about the application of OOP concepts (like setters and getters), and by the time I got to know where to apply these (from Qt signals and slots), it was too late.

I plan to rewrite a huge chunk of this project by the end of this year. This is not a stable release as of now. If you're interested in contributing, I humbly request you to wait for a couple more months for me to release the first stable release of this project. I'm sure that this project has loads of room to grow, and I don't want the current hacky state of the code to hinder its potential. So, please star this repository and open an issue if you want to request a new feature / contribute a new feature. I plan to work on this project again during my winter break and hopefully I'll be able to implement what I know, properly, by then.

I plan to make an API for the renderer and also introduce a command line tool (like CPDF) which allows to transform and clip particular pages of the input PDF. This way, Isophine would also be ready for implementation in scripts.