Codehelp blog

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.

po4a, including the new po4a-build script, has been released and po4a (0.37.0-1) has been uploaded to Debian. This release also includes a fully updated Spanish translation, including the new po4a-build documentation, thanks to Omar Campagne.

po4a-build will be used as a build-dependency by emdebian-rootfs and svn-buildpackage (both due to have updated releases in a couple of days). (po4a-build itself was developed and tested within these packages - as 'genmanpages'.)

po4a-build is intended to make it as easy to produce translated documentation as it can be to produce the current untranslated content.

When po4a prepares the translated content as POD or DocBook XML, the final documentation can then be built using po4a-build. Both the untranslated and translated content is built as a single process, updating the POT files at the same time.

Existing build instructions are replaced by a single call to po4a-build and a simple configuration file is used to tell po4a-build how to build each element and which binary packages will include the translated and untranslated content.

See po4a-build (1) and po4a-build.conf (5) from the installed po4a package.

Feel free to try it out with any package that builds translated documentation, *especially* if it also builds binary gettext translations of program output without using autotools, e.g. perl scripts using $(MAKE) but not ./configure.

This should be a useful step in encouraging more packages to translate their script output and manpages. It is trivial to add translation to packages using the full autotools|intltool setup, now po4a-build brings the same level of ease to packages only using $(MAKE). (If someone wants to investigate how CMake can do the same, let me know.)

http://alioth.debian.org/projects/po4a/

http://alioth.debian.org/frs/download.php/3183/po4a-v0.37.0.tar.gz

http://freshmeat.net/projects/po4a/releases
(0.37.0 announcement pending approval by FM)

First I thought a recent xorg update was just not recognising the trackpad and mouse buttons on the Acer Aspire1. Then I thought something was wrong with the Emdebian Grip installation of Squeeze, then I tried upgrading the kernel to 2.6.30 and just now I tried a Graphical Rescue Mode boot of the Lenny Debian Installer.

The trackpad is non-responsive, the mouse buttons are non-responsive. The trackpad still shows up in various system messages but simply doesn't move the pointer or activate any menus. Keyboard shortcuts still work but no mouse. (I gave away my USB mouse but I guess that's the next test.)

Could this be something other than the hardware failure that it appears?

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.