MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - PDFRead on Mac OS X -- PDFRasterFarian for OS X!

larryy · 10-31-2009, 06:36 PM

I got PDFRead (1.8.2) to work reasonably well on Mac OS X 10.5.x, but it took a lot of effort getting all the pieces together, and required some minor hacking of PDFRead itself. Best place to start is the current thread.

And after hours spent on this, it works exactly as advertised, but the text is just so small for your typical two-column journal article that I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it. It looks like there might be hope for this from PaperCrop, but that's back to Windows-only, sigh. Anyway, here are some PaperCrop links:

mobileread forum thread
home page
source code

I sure would love to see the big PDFRead rewrite incorporate the PDF parsing and re-layout algorithms of PaperCrop, so two-column documents could be gracefully turned into single-column documents (making sure whole-page-width figures don't get chopped), and taken all the way to .prc files. That would be my dream tool. I'm fine with using it from the command-line, though Python GUIs can be made cross-platform, which would be nice, I suppose.

Anyway, a few notes on things I had to do to get PDFRead to be fully functional on Mac OS X 10.5.x are below.

- larryy

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I followed the CPAN instructions on this mobiperl page to install Palm::PDB, XML::Parser::Lite::Tree, GD, Image::BMP, Image::Size, HTML::TreeBuilder, Getopt::Mixed, Date::Parse, and Date::Format.

I also had to install pngnq, which I did using FinkCommander, which requires fink, as I already had fink and FinkCommander installed.

That also allowed me to do the following:

sudo apt-get install xpdf imagemagick ghostscript ghostscript-fonts

At a minimum, PDFRead's common.py check_commands() function needs to replace

call(command)

with

call(command, '-h')

as call('gs') hangs, probably waiting for input.

I also had trouble with PDFRead building the html and png files, but not generating the .prc file, until I coaxed the code into telling me what pieces it was missing (in that same check_commands() function). Note: It's okay for rbmake and djvused to be missing, if you're trying to go from PDF to PRC.

Sorry if that's not a complete specification. I pounded on this for hours, and these are my undoubtedly spotty recollections.

10-31-2009, 06:36 PM	#11
larryy Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Oct 2009 Device: Kindle 2	Update to Mac OS X 10.5.x (Tiger) and pulling together useful links I got PDFRead (1.8.2) to work reasonably well on Mac OS X 10.5.x, but it took a lot of effort getting all the pieces together, and required some minor hacking of PDFRead itself. Best place to start is the current thread. And after hours spent on this, it works exactly as advertised, but the text is just so small for your typical two-column journal article that I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it. It looks like there might be hope for this from PaperCrop, but that's back to Windows-only, sigh. Anyway, here are some PaperCrop links: mobileread forum thread home page source code I sure would love to see the big PDFRead rewrite incorporate the PDF parsing and re-layout algorithms of PaperCrop, so two-column documents could be gracefully turned into single-column documents (making sure whole-page-width figures don't get chopped), and taken all the way to .prc files. That would be my dream tool. I'm fine with using it from the command-line, though Python GUIs can be made cross-platform, which would be nice, I suppose. Anyway, a few notes on things I had to do to get PDFRead to be fully functional on Mac OS X 10.5.x are below. - larryy --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I followed the CPAN instructions on this mobiperl page to install Palm::PDB, XML::Parser::Lite::Tree, GD, Image::BMP, Image::Size, HTML::TreeBuilder, Getopt::Mixed, Date::Parse, and Date::Format. I also had to install pngnq, which I did using FinkCommander, which requires fink, as I already had fink and FinkCommander installed. That also allowed me to do the following: sudo apt-get install xpdf imagemagick ghostscript ghostscript-fonts At a minimum, PDFRead's common.py check_commands() function needs to replace call(command) with call(command, '-h') as call('gs') hangs, probably waiting for input. I also had trouble with PDFRead building the html and png files, but not generating the .prc file, until I coaxed the code into telling me what pieces it was missing (in that same check_commands() function). Note: It's okay for rbmake and djvused to be missing, if you're trying to go from PDF to PRC. Sorry if that's not a complete specification. I pounded on this for hours, and these are my undoubtedly spotty recollections.