Hi,

http://www.syngrithy.org.uk/images/alexander_turcic.png

The addition of scribbles on pdfs is very useful to make notes and annotations on the move. But what if you want to use these notes on a laptop or desktop...? Or if you want to email them to people...? Well... Since the Irex Scribble format is xml, it is quite easy to do this...

So... Here's a quick demonstration and example php script that does just that... mergeScribble.php (http://www.syngrithy.org.uk/php/download.php?file=mergeScribble.tar.gz)

This (http://www.syngrithy.org.uk/index.php?pT=7) page has links to the requirements (PHP 5, fpdf, fpdi & PEAR Console/Getopt).

I think Irex have mentioned that they will be coming out with official support some time soon, but someone might find this handy until then...

Oh, and sorry Mr Turcic, but I think the beard suits you... :D

Cool utility. Question: having exported the scribbles this way, is it possible to get the Vision Objects PC software to parse them into searchable text?

Cool utility. Question: having exported the scribbles this way, is it possible to get the Vision Objects PC software to parse them into searchable text?

Not sure, this is something I would think Irex's tool would do. Best talk to them...

Sorry if this question is incredibly naive, but...

when I click on "mergeScribble.php" it just downloads a text file
"download.php" with a bunch of warnings in it.

Merging the scribble xml with pdf would be extremely useful...
it would reduce my paper useage by about 90% and so I am
eager to try it out!

Give it a go now... Could've sworn that was working this morning...!

Got it, thanks!

Indeed this is a planned feature and will be available shortly

Indeed this is a planned feature and will be available shortly
This would be cool! :cool:

Updated script so that it adds bookmarks to pdfs to show which pages have Scribbles... (Can only see these in Acrobat)

I tried to install php and all the needed packages on my NSLU2 which has an XScale processor aswell and runs on 266Mhz.

The procces worked fine, took a while, but produced an unreadable result :(
On my windows machine it worked like a charm.

I uploaded the files in case anyone knows pdfs enough to find out what the problem might be. (floating point operations?)

I uploaded the files in case anyone knows pdfs enough to find out what the problem might be. (floating point operations?)

Opening it with Evince gives me a lot of :


Error (6575): Illegal character <2e> in hex string
Error (6575): Illegal character <b0> in hex string
Error (6586): Illegal character '>'
Error: End of file inside array
Error: Leftover args in content stream
Error (6909): Unknown operator 'ø00'
Error (6921): Too many args in content stream


So... Some kind of encoding problem...?

I've gotten this to work at home where I've installed php5,
but doing so at work is problematic. Is anyone out there thinking of
making some sort of os x package for merging pdf and scribbles?
Should I start pestering iRex?

Should I start pestering iRex?

Perhaps, although I'm thinking a more elegant way to do this would be to do everything on the Illiad -- the Iliad can convert handwriting to input characters already... Use the device to capture bookmarks instead of scribbles. And then insert the bookmarks into the pdf...

So there's a challenging task to anyone who feels they're any good... Make the pdf viewer capture bookmarks and add them to a pdf... (And of course you'll need to have some indication of what/where the bookmarks are...) :D

What PDF writing lib could be used in the device? Is there an Open Source one available written in C(++)? The PHP option is of course not feasible on the device itself.

What PDF writing lib could be used in the device? Is there an Open Source one available written in C(++)?

Ah... Forgot that little point... :(

What PDF writing lib could be used in the device? Is there an Open Source one available written in C(++)? The PHP option is of course not feasible on the device itself.

The only one I know that is not in Java is pdfedit, and is not a lib+program_for_ui, just a program.

http://pdfedit.petricek.net/
http://pdfedit.petricek.net/index.php?page=index_e

It's a GPL'd C++ application written using the Qt3 libraries and boost. Their authors describes it as a program using "C++, XPDF, QT3 and QSA". Depends heavily on scripting (QSA).

Transforming it to a library could be tough, but it's a start.

It may be worthy investigating it, as it enables exactly what users are requesting (adding/editing text comments, adding objects, etc), and can be compiled and put on the iliad (it has a command-line version; the easiest path would be to modify it to do whatever is needed).