Just to spice up my life and possibly yours too... here's this out-of-the blue surprise.
This looks, at the first glance, like a regular PDF file. file command on a Linux box identifies it as "PDF document, version 1.4". It opens fine in pretty much any PDF reader (Acroread, KPDF, evince, whatever). However, if you decide to print it then it becomes a whole different ballgame.
It prints very slowly when it does. From Acroread 8 it does not print at all. That was checked on both OpenSuSE Linux 10.3 and MS Windows Vista so I have reason to believe that the problem at hand is most likely OS-agnostic.
It does print using the system print (lp) on OpenSuSE Linux 10.3. It prints on OpenSuSE Linux in Acroread 7, CentOS 5 Linux under Acroread 5 as well as on MacOS 10 under Preview. When converted to Postscript via pdftops it yields a humongous (100+ MB) Postscript file which is quite impressive given that the PDF file being converted is only a less-than-a-megabyte 13-page document.
If you know what this mystery PDF file is about or have encountered this mutation of PDF yourself - shout, and together we shall prevail!
Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PDF. Show all posts
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Monday, October 1, 2007
In praise of MediaWiki
Well, something new to deal with every day... Or every week at least. The latest wonder I've come across was MediaWiki. Don't laugh - you may have had a Wiki site for years but me - up until very recently I had only been a Wiki user, not a Wiki administrator.
What can I say - this is a very nice piece of software. Installs right off the bat, easy to administer. I read the code a bit and it mostly makes sense right away too - which is, obviously, quite nice to know.
There is only one drawback that I have discovered thus far - it does not seem to be configured to search within PDF files by default, and that is exactly the functionality we need. Under Linux one has a very nice text extracftor for the purpose called pdftotext(1) that comes as part of xpdf. So technically it should not be difficult to implement this functionality under MediaWiki though I am generally somewhat reluctant to touch the code I don't own. The best I could get out of the users' forum was a suggestion to use the Lucene Search software but that looks like a whole can of worms in and of itself - and is not even guaranteed to actually do what I need done. But I guess this way or the other I will get through this one.
If any of you have any relevant experience - please advise, and your advice will as always be appreciated. But this little diffuculty notwithstanding MediaWiki really is very nice technology that does allow one to have a Wiki-style reference site up and running in under an hour.
What can I say - this is a very nice piece of software. Installs right off the bat, easy to administer. I read the code a bit and it mostly makes sense right away too - which is, obviously, quite nice to know.
There is only one drawback that I have discovered thus far - it does not seem to be configured to search within PDF files by default, and that is exactly the functionality we need. Under Linux one has a very nice text extracftor for the purpose called pdftotext(1) that comes as part of xpdf. So technically it should not be difficult to implement this functionality under MediaWiki though I am generally somewhat reluctant to touch the code I don't own. The best I could get out of the users' forum was a suggestion to use the Lucene Search software but that looks like a whole can of worms in and of itself - and is not even guaranteed to actually do what I need done. But I guess this way or the other I will get through this one.
If any of you have any relevant experience - please advise, and your advice will as always be appreciated. But this little diffuculty notwithstanding MediaWiki really is very nice technology that does allow one to have a Wiki-style reference site up and running in under an hour.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)