Successful start . . .

gPDFText was only released yesterday and it's being downloaded three times faster than my next most popular upstream project: drivel. Even nicer, it only took under a month to get to this point - and that includes a string freeze to get four translations for the program output and three for the User Manual (which uses yelp, as usual).

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.

Many downloaded PDF files for ebook readers still use the A4 paper type (or letter which is similar in size) and when the PDF is displayed on the ebook reader, the zoom required to display the entire page makes the text too small. Simply exporting the PDF into text causes problems with line wrapping and the various ways that ebook PDFs indicate page headers and footers make it hard to automate the conversion.

gPDFText loads the PDF, extracts the text, reformats the paragraphs into single long lines and then puts the text into a standard GTK+ editor where you can make other adjustments.

On the ebook reader, the plain text file then has no unwanted line breaks and can be zoomed to whatever text size you prefer.

Each reformatting option can be turned off using the gPDFText preferences window.

Spelling support also helps identify areas where the text has not been fully reconstructed.

Debian & Ubuntu - it's waiting in NEW but it should build fine on Squeeze and Jaunty or Karmic. Any feedback, use the wiki. Any bugs, use the Trac tickets. All links available via the SF pages.

Hopefully, the extra interest will produce some more people will join the work to improve it. It's a fairly simple codebase, lots of TODO and FIXME items for new contributors to work on and it's all up to date with GtkBuilder and ready for GTK+3.0. If you are looking for an upstream project, take a look at the SVN and give it a go.