[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by larryy

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.

Thanks for sticking it through those rough spots. I updated the PDFRead forum post #1 to include a link to your instructions above.

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

Yep, I agree that PaperCrop is a useful software program especially when used with the pi algorithm.

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.

Me too, I would love to see this happen, but my python programming skills are not that strong (to be able to do this alone... )

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.

This is useful for my modified "NRhtml2mobi.pl" adapted from the MobiPerl suite.

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.

Anyone having any other issues getting this to work? Ask now or forever...