Answers

Neil Bothwick takes two Tuxes into the bathroom, as they’re penguins.

Q Where is the program?

I read about PDF Mix Tool in LXF281. This is something that I have always wanted to have, so I downloaded the file pdfmixtool-master.tar.gz and then extracted it as pdfmixtool-master. This is a directory containing some files. My problem now is, how do I start the program? I am baffled.

Bryan Mitchell

A The file you downloaded is the source code from the project’s GitLab repository. All open source software is distributed in this way, although much of it is also built into packages by the distro maintainers. The steps for installing from source can vary, although there are standard ways of doing it. There is normally a README or INSTALL file within the files you unpacked that contains instructions for compiling and installing the software. In the case of PDF Mix Tool, it uses the CMake build system. The first step is to make sure you have CMake installed – check in your package manager. While you are there, also see that you have Qt, Qpdf and Imagemagick installed, these are needed when building and running PDF Mix Tool. Now open a terminal and change to the directory containing the files you unpacked and run these commands to build the software.

$ mkdir build

$ cd build

$ cmake.. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/ usr/local -DCMAKE_BUILD_ TYPE=Release

$ make

Once this has run, you will find the executable file in the build/bin directory. This is good for temporary testing, but if