PRS-500 PDFrasterFarian v2.0 beta

[kitsunebi]

Please (continue to) ignore my two previous posts. I was able to install PDFrasterFarian successfully and am delighted by its effectiveness. I can finally read all my Google books! Outstanding program.

[jmmcg9]

What did you do to get the program to work? Thx, Joe

[jthunt11]

You will want to move the folder that PDFrasterFarian is in to somewhere you are going to keep it. (I put it under c:\program files\ebook\ ). When you have it there, double click on the install.cmd, follow the prompts, and thats it.

Now just right click on the PDF file you want to convert and you will see a PDFrasterFarian option.

[kitsunebi]

Originally Posted by jmmcg9

What did you do to get the program to work? Thx, Joe

I did two things: (a) I re-downloaded the program and (b) I temporarily turned off my computer's firewall and then reinstalled it. I hadn't turned off my firewall before.

[TND]

Humm.. I seem to be having a weird problem. Proggy hangs after the first 2 pages.

Is anyone else having the same problem? Any fixes?

[alex_d]

ok, check out version 2.2.0

NEW:

+better image quality (sharper and higher contrast, but a bit less smooth)

+no more AutoImager (i wrote my own dilate filter)

+installation/right-click menu now not necessary. Just double-click "PDFrasterFarian.cmd" and use the regular Windows dialog box to choose a PDF to open and a filename to save.

+conversion is ~20% faster

+"promptless" support (can be called from a batch script without user input... post if you'd like more details)


I really hope this fixes the problems people had getting PDFrasterFarian to work and also offers good improvement for the older users. The interface in 2.2 is still text-based, but i'm working on 3.0 with a gui with layout manipulation, manual cropping, folders of images, batched conversions, etc.


Note: .NET Framework 2.0 is now required (hey... it's not as bad as Java)

[Azayzel]

Sweet! This is nice, I'll have to give it a whirl and compare it with previous runs in your earlier version. Must've been a bugger to write your own filter to apply (a friend of mine did one with a stego-detection program he wrote, but it was done it Java... I think). Thanks Alex!

[RTbar]

Mine goes to pages into the process and then the dilater says it has an error and must close. when I try to use the right click, it works, but makes a 2kb file that is unreadable

[RSaunders]

Originally Posted by RTbar

Mine goes to pages into the process and then the dilater says it has an error and must close. when I try to use the right click, it works, but makes a 2kb file that is unreadable

When I run it, on a 16 page PDF, it gives no errors put produces the same size (2kb) file. The file, with .PDF extension, is not appealing to Acrobat. The first letters are "L R F è þ4 ", rather than the "%PDF-1.5 %âãÏÓ" you might expect.

[Dave Qua]

I seem to have a similar problem. Appears to read in the pdf file OK but then tells me that Dilate has stopped working. I'm running Vista Ultimate and have gor .Net framework installed. The prog runs fine on my other computer running XP so I guess it is an operating system problem. I've included the infor that appears after the prog has stopped working in case it helps.
======================
...Creating EPS file from PDF page
...Performing autocropping (this step may take several minutes)
...Rastering PNG file from EPS file (this step may take several minutes)
...Running PNG file through Dilation and Shrink filters

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembl
y 'imageManip, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of
its dependencies. The application has failed to start because its side-by-side c
onfiguration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1)
File name: 'imageManip, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' -
--> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x800736B1): The application ha
s failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please se
e the application event log for more detail. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800736B1
)
at Dilate.Program.Dilate(Bitmap bitmap)
at Dilate.Program.Main(String[] args)


...Running PNG file through Sharpening filter
convert.exe: unable to open image `C:\PDFrasterFarian 2.2.0\\temp\stage6\0002':
No such file or directory.
convert.exe: missing an image filename `C:\PDFrasterFarian 2.2.0\\temp\stage7\00
02'.

ERROR!!! Post-Processing failed!

Please make sure you have .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

If the problem persists, please report it at the mobileread forums.

[RTbar]

Im running XP and I used 2.16 fine, but now 2.20 wont go past the dialter on page 2

[alex_d]

Overwriting the original PDF and outputting another PDF is definately not what it is supposed to be doing. I've found and fixed the problem. And I think I've found how to fix the .net error, but Dave will let me know regarding that.

I've also deleted all the captions referencing the evil AutoImager.

PDFrasterfarian 2.2.1

"Sweet! This is nice, I'll have to give it a whirl and compare it with previous runs in your earlier version. Must've been a bugger to write your own filter to apply (a friend of mine did one with a stego-detection program he wrote, but it was done it Java... I think). Thanks Alex!"

Actually, the dilate filter turned out mind-numblingly easy. You just read in nine pixels and output the biggest of the bunch. I implemented it as a native C++/CLI library that I call from a .NET executable (in which i read the png into memory and get a pointer to the raw data). Implementing an image filter in Java must have given some horrible performance.

But anyway, please compare the new post-processing. It's easier to read but maybe not as nice to look at as the older fuzzier version. There's also some concern that the mode that i now run ghostscript in will render some fonts incorrectly. I think I'll restore the old processing as an option under Advance mode. If you'd like, you can also try tweaking kernel-processing.cmd/kernel-preview.cmd to see if maybe you can arrive at better settings.

Some notable lines:
line 73/74 which controls ghostscript (the new param -dGridFitTT=3 may give problems. Old behavior was =2)
line 82/83 which runs the contrast-enhancing filter. (new param is -unsharp 2x0.8+2.0, old is -unsharp 2x1+1)

[alex_d]

by the lack of, "omg, pdfrasterfarian formatted my computer," i'm guessing 2.2.1 is working smoothly?

[TND]

Just tried the new version. But it seems to be still generating a PDF and overwriting the original PDF file.

Cheers,
TJ

Originally Posted by alex_d

by the lack of, "omg, pdfrasterfarian formatted my computer," i'm guessing 2.2.1 is working smoothly?

[alex_d]

oops, that's because the link is wrong and was pointing back to 2.2.0 (the name of the rar file was also 2.2.0)

here's the right one:
http://projects.mobileread.com/reade...an%202.2.1.rar