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Sunday, November 22. 2009gpdftext in Debian
gPDFText is a text editor for GTK+ that opens PDF documents for ebook readers, converts the text contents into plain ASCII text, restores the original paragraphs and removes unwanted line breaks to allow easier zooming on the reader. gPDFText is now in Debian unstable and on a mirror near you. There are no obvious hindrances to a simple, clean migration into Squeeze and Ubuntu, once the necessary time has elapsed.
The current release is v0.0.2 and adds support for undo/redo as well as a few more translations, giving me six in all: Czech, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish, for both the program and the Help Manual. Many many thanks to the translators concerned. (New translations are always welcome - the notable exception to the current list is French IMHO. Both POT files are included in the Debian source package via the upstream tarball. Just do apt-get source gpdftext, you'll find gpdftext-0.0.2/po/gpdftext.pot and gpdftext-0.0.2/help/gpdftext-help.pot. File wishlist bugs against gpdftext in the Debian BTS as normal, once your translation is complete, one bug for each PO file.) There's also the upstream bug tracker if you want to use that - you need to be logged into SourceForge - SF does support OpenID, not sure if you need an SF account or just the OpenID. Just started adding PDF write support, so that the typical A4 PDF file can be rewritten as an A5 PDF as well as plain text. Initially, I thought I'd use libpoppler-glib directly but that's only for reading PDF. It can work with PS, so I tried that and libgs8 from ghostscript. Turned out that I should have been looking at cairo and pango all along. (Check out the buffer_to_ps function.) That said, I haven't actually got the full interface working yet, so I've yet to see just what kind of PDF I get. This is part of the roadmap to go into version 0.1.0 along with some other interface additions, so the Manual will be getting some new content and the program a few new translatable strings. I'll make the usual string freeze announcements and call for updates when the time comes. I don't expect to be changing the existing strings much for 0.1.0. I'm happy to add new translations based on 0.0.2 and then request an update once I know that 0.1.0 actually works. Trackbacks
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Seems like this could be ideal for using on the OpenMoko FreeRunner, you might want to advertise it on the community mailing list and the draft for the next Community Updates release:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates
? gpdftext may seem lightweight but the PDF files being handled are not. Extracting the text from a complete novel of several hundred pages, applying regular expressions across each page in the entire text, all takes appreciable resources. Even on a dual-core amd64 powerhouse like my desktop machine, it takes long enough to need a progressbar, even when handling a relatively short novel. This isn't a script like pdf2text or ps2pdf, Besides, why would a user need to reformat an eBook PDF on a phone? Reformat an eBook PDF on their desktop machine for *reading* on a small device, yes. I have a Freerunner, I'd never dream of using it as a text editing platform, beyond the limits of SMS or Twitter.
Spanish seems an important language to be missing there too, being the 3rd most important language in the Internet [1], the 2nd in terms of native speakers [2], and always listed among the most influential languages
[1] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm [2] http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm [3] http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm
Spanish is indeed missing, not through a lack of requests. If you have time, please contribute the es translation. If not, I hope someone else will be able to do so. I have Spanish translations wherever these are available in other projects.
(Fixed a typo in the post too - lack of an 'e' on Portuguese.) |
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