30 Mar
2010
30 Mar
'10
2:04 a.m.
Hi List,
This is a question what is the best way to make a lage amount of pdf files (hundreds of
GB, more to come) and make them available for a Local Area Network of users to print and
edit them. Make them searchable and get the file easily and send them per mail to print.
There is currently a Windows solution including completly unfree tools so that not every
computer can even do the work we are supposed to do because of license restrictions (at
least its all legal). The current windows-based database is slow in access and has a heavy
lag to snyc files, sometimes even hours.
I don't have access to the servers so I can't check whats going on, but I want to
know if there isn't a Linux way :)
Where I work we prepare lots of notation for print and finally print them. There are sadly
no source files: We get generated pdf files from various software from all OS and we
produce scans of existing material. There are few meta information like Composer, Title
and a serial number.
Actual Questions:
1) What Database/Way and Frontend would you use to handle pdf files? (Filesizes per file
>200 kb <200 MB, Multiple files per project/musical piece )
2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides "PDFEdit" (which seemed fine from
screenshots and descriptions, but first tries were not successful)
Always this unfree binary crap,
Nils
30 Mar
30 Mar
7:56 a.m.
New subject: How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage
On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 3:48 AM, Nils Hammerfest <list(a)nilsgey.de> wrote:
2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides "PDFEdit" (which seemed
fine from screenshots and descriptions, but first tries were not successful)
I do a lot of work with PDF and I use Ghostscript
(http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) to do much of the editing. You are
likely to be able to do the basic editing you need with Ghostscript if
you take the time to investigate the correct command line syntax.
Good luck.
Peter
3:43 p.m.
Nils Hammerfest wrote:
This is a question what is the best way to make a lage
amount of pdf files (hundreds of GB, more to come) and make them available for a Local
Area Network of users to print and edit them. Make them searchable and get the file easily
and send them per mail to print.
There is currently a Windows solution including completly unfree tools so that not every
computer can even do the work we are supposed to do because of license restrictions (at
least its all legal). The current windows-based database is slow in access and has a heavy
lag to snyc files, sometimes even hours.
I don't have access to the servers so I can't check whats going on, but I want to
know if there isn't a Linux way :)
Where I work we prepare lots of notation for print and finally print them. There are
sadly no source files: We get generated pdf files from various software from all OS and we
produce scans of existing material. There are few meta information like Composer, Title
and a serial number.
Actual Questions:
1) What Database/Way and Frontend would you use to handle pdf files? (Filesizes per file
>200 kb <200 MB, Multiple files per project/musical piece )
Get a quality enterprise content management system. There is a
full-blown FOSS one called Alfresco that you could try out and see how
it goes:
http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/
ECMs provide powerful searching capabilities, enhanced by the ability to
tag documents with metadata that make searching and managing them
easier. I would think that categories such as musician, composer,
instruments, etc, might be very useful in your situation.
I'm not a user of Alfresco, I work with its cousin, EMC Documentum.
(Alfresco was founded by one of the men who founded Documentum.)
Documentum has been described by some as the Maserati of ECM (it can do
practically anything anyone might want to do in the ECM field, but costs
a LOT and takes a lot of experienced help!)
2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides
"PDFEdit" (which seemed fine from screenshots and descriptions, but first tries
were not successful)
Sorry, have no clue there, the usual advice about editing PDFs is to
edit the SOURCE document and regenerate the PDF. PDFs really aren't
intended to be edited - text editing even in Adobe Acrobat is tedious.
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
4:54 p.m.
New subject: How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage
Nils Hammerfest wrote:
fill a
form and it was fine for that purpose.
Pablo
2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides
"PDFEdit" (which seemed fine
from screenshots and descriptions, but first
tries were not successful)
Maybe a bit overkilling but inkscape can edit PDFs. I have used it once to
3 Apr
3 Apr
9:56 a.m.
Get a quality enterprise content management system.
There is a
full-blown FOSS one called Alfresco that you could try out and see how
it goes:
http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/
Thanks for your information. I will have a look at this
2) Do you know
any free PDF editor besides "PDFEdit" (which seemed fine from screenshots and
descriptions, but first tries were not successful)
Sorry, have no clue there, the usual advice about editing PDFs is to
edit the SOURCE document and regenerate the PDF. PDFs really aren't
intended to be edited - text editing even in Adobe Acrobat is tedious.
10:31 a.m.
* Nils Hammerfest [2010-04-03 17:56]:
You might find pdftk useful for some of what you want, although it's a
command-line tool so it might take some work to use it in your workflow:
http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/
Sorry, have no
clue there, the usual advice about editing PDFs is to
edit the SOURCE document and regenerate the PDF.
The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by scans. So in fact
we are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks
here are to add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. 
12:29 p.m.
New subject: How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage
PDFsam -- PDF Split-And-Merge is a handy open-source tool. (
http://www.pdfsam.org/)
But its title is its featureset, for the most part. It allows you to reorder
PDFs, pull pages out, add pages in, rotate pages 90, 180, 270 degrees, etc.
Command-line driven but there's also a gui console.
It's got a windows installer, but should run anywhere Java is available.
Sounds like on top of the scanning and organizing solution, you need to
figure out some OCR application to extract metadata from each of the PDFs in
a large-scale way.
If you're planning to put these out for public consumption, you can use
Google to assist you in your scanning and indexing:
http://www.labnol.org/software/convert-scanned-pdf-images-to-text-with-goog…
Alternatively, the open-source OCR world is getting better fast. Check out
OCRopus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus) -- it's a linux-based
command-line OCR tool. You should be able to incorporate this into a
workflow, it'll spit out what it thinks your PDF says in htmlish (specified
here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfxcv4vc_67g844kf).
I could see a workflow on your end that creates four rotations of each page
scanned, then attempts to OCR them in each degree of rotation with OCRopus,
compares the results, and persists in your datastore the one with the
highest combination of recognized characters and recognition score. I
suppose this is only really helpful if a) your PDFs often get scanned
upside-down or sideways, and b) all your PDFs have some amount of digital
typography on them.
Anyway, a couple ideas.
-----
Luke Peterson
On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Nils Hammerfest <list(a)nilsgey.de> wrote:
Get a quality
enterprise content management system. There is a
full-blown FOSS one called Alfresco that you could try out and see how
it goes:
http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/
Thanks for your information. I will have a look at this
> 2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides
"PDFEdit" (which seemed fine
from screenshots and descriptions, but first
tries were not successful)
Sorry, have no clue there, the usual advice about editing PDFs is to
edit the SOURCE document and regenerate the PDF. PDFs really aren't
intended to be edited - text editing even in Adobe Acrobat is tedious.
The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by scans. So in fact we
are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks here are to
add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. or crop borders
for a section, selection, all etc. and in the end save them again. I think
with some scripts it should be possible to do the decrompress/compress thing
from pdf->images->pdf but still this leaves the point of pagewise editing. I
don't know for sure but I think gimp or inkscape cannot do this.
Nils
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Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
6:37 p.m.
New subject: How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage
On the topic of OCR, you could also check out specialized Optical
Music Recognition systems
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_music_recognition). In the
university department where I wrote my dimploma thesis gamera
(http://gamera.informatik.hsnr.de/) was used for this task.
Cheers, Daniel
2010/4/3 Luke Peterson <luke.peterson(a)gmail.com>om>:
PDFsam -- PDF Split-And-Merge is a handy open-source
tool.
(http://www.pdfsam.org/)
But its title is its featureset, for the most part. It allows you to reorder
PDFs, pull pages out, add pages in, rotate pages 90, 180, 270 degrees, etc.
Command-line driven but there's also a gui console.
It's got a windows installer, but should run anywhere Java is available.
Sounds like on top of the scanning and organizing solution, you need to
figure out some OCR application to extract metadata from each of the PDFs in
a large-scale way.
If you're planning to put these out for public consumption, you can use
Google to assist you in your scanning and indexing:
http://www.labnol.org/software/convert-scanned-pdf-images-to-text-with-goog…
Alternatively, the open-source OCR world is getting better fast. Check out
OCRopus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus) -- it's a linux-based
command-line OCR tool. You should be able to incorporate this into a
workflow, it'll spit out what it thinks your PDF says in htmlish (specified
here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfxcv4vc_67g844kf).
I could see a workflow on your end that creates four rotations of each page
scanned, then attempts to OCR them in each degree of rotation with OCRopus,
compares the results, and persists in your datastore the one with the
highest combination of recognized characters and recognition score. I
suppose this is only really helpful if a) your PDFs often get scanned
upside-down or sideways, and b) all your PDFs have some amount of digital
typography on them.
Anyway, a couple ideas.
-----
Luke Peterson
5 Apr
5 Apr
6:43 a.m.
Nils Hammerfest wrote:
The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by
scans. So in fact we are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks here
are to add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. or crop
borders for a section, selection, all etc. and in the end save them again. I think with
some scripts it should be possible to do the decrompress/compress thing from
pdf->images->pdf but still this leaves the point of pagewise editing. I don't
know for sure but I think gimp or inkscape cannot do this.
Inkscape only deals with single pages, and it is a vector graphic program so not
useful for your purposes - you have multi page documents of scanned images. For
tweaking page order, rotation etc - dealing with the document structure - then
pdfedit works for me, but if you want to change the content of scanned pages
then maybe use pdfedit to get the single page, something like gimp to edit the
scanned image, then put the edited image back in the document using pdfedit.
All the pdf tools seem to do one or two things, but not other things - I find
pdfedit the essential glue for dealing with multi page documents in a GUI
way.PDF is a big format to deal with, and as someone said it's main use is
distributing finished documents in a consistent way, but from time to time one
needs to tweak such things.
I (only occasionally) use the pdfedit version that comes with Debian Sid -
version 0.4.3.
Simon
4:47 p.m.
On Saturday 03 April 2010 11:56:23 Nils Hammerfest wrote:
The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by
scans. So in fact we
are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks here are
to add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. or crop
borders for a section, selection, all etc. and in the end save them again.
I think with some scripts it should be possible to do the
decrompress/compress thing from pdf->images->pdf but still this leaves the
point of pagewise editing. I don't know for sure but I think gimp or
inkscape cannot do this.
pdfpages package for latex can do some of this.
You can include specific pages from a pdf document, or from several, and do
some simple operations to them.
sincerely,
Marije
5140
days inactive
5146
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
9 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
Alexandros Diamantidis -
Daniel Appelt -
david -
Luke Peterson -
nescivi -
Nils Hammerfest -
Pablo Fernandez -
Peter Desjardins -
Simon Wise