pdfebc-core 0.3.0

Core functions of the pdfebc tools. The pdfebc tools is (going to be) a .set of tools for compressing PDF files to e-reader friendly sizes.

Docs

Contents

• Overview

• Purpose of the project

• Requirements

• Install

  • Option 1: Install from PyPi with pip

  • Option 2: Clone the repo and the install with pip

• License

• Contributing

Overview

pdfebc is planned to be a set of tools for compressing PDF files to e-reader friendly sizes, and optionally sending them via e-mail to for example a Kindle. This package contains the core functions that may be utilized by different user interfaces. Currently, I am planning to create a CLI, a web interface and a desktop GUI. This is very much a practice project for me, but one that is alos useful to me (at least the CLI version, the others are just practice).

As an example use case, I mainly use pdfebc as an easy way to compress lecture slides and similar study materials, send them to my Kindle and then clean up the output.

Purpose of the project

The core functionality of pdfebc, along with a basic CLI, was already done when I started this little project. As such, the main purpose here isn’t to provide the functionality, but to do so in a robust way, with proper documentation, testing and continuous integration. This is also an exercise in writing a program’s business logic in such a way so that any interface can be slapped on top of it. This is also one of my first forays into using stuff like sphinx, Travis-CI and ReadTheDocs, so there’s bound to be some weirdness here and there. I am also diving deeper into how to use git and trying new things, so the commit history may suffer from some inconsistencies.

Requirements

Aside from the Python omdules listed in requirements.txt, the following requirements must be met:

• Python 3.6

  • Strictly speaking, 3.5 should also work fine, but the tests use 3.6 features so the build is only tested for 3.6.

• Ghostscript

  • pdfebc requires Ghostscript for the PDF compression. The default binary is gs, but this can be specified via the CLI.

• A Gmail account (for sending e-mails)

  • By default, pdfebc uses Google’s SMTP server to send e-mails. The program can however be configured to use any SMTP server by maniupulating the config.cnf file (please see this sample configuration for formatting). Currently, the server must support TLS.

Install

Option 1: Install from PyPi with pip

The latest release of pdfebc-core is on PyPi, and can thus be installed as usual with pip. I strongly discourage system-wide pip installs (i.e. sudo pip install <package>), as this may land you with incompatible packages in a very short amount of time. A per-user install can be done like this:

1. Execute pip install --user pdfebc-core to install the package.

2. Currently, you must add the configuration file manually. Please have a look at the sample configuration file for details. Where to put the configuration file is machine-dependent, and decided by the appdirs package. Run apdirs.user_config_dir('pdfebc') in the Python interpreter to find the correct directory. Note that you must first import appdirs for it to be available in the interpreter. Note: When using a Gmail account, I strongly recommend using an App password instead of the actual account password.

Option 2: Clone the repo and the install with pip

If you want the dev version, you will need to clone the repo, as only release versions are uploaded to PyPi. Unless you are planning to work on this yourself, I suggest going with the release version.

1. Clone the repo with git:

   • git clone https://github.com/slarse/pdfebc-core

2. cd into the project root directory and install with pip.

   • pip install --user ., this will create a local install for the current user.

   • Or just pip install . if you use virtualenv.

   • For development, use pip install -e . in a virtualenv.

3. Currently, you must add the configuration file manually. Please have a look at the sample configuration file for details. Where to put the configuration file is machine-dependent, and decided by the appdirs package. Run apdirs.user_config_dir('pdfebc') in the Python interpreter to find the correct directory. Note that you must first import appdirs for it to be available in the interpreter. Note: When using a Gmail account, I strongly recommend using an App password instead of the actual account password.

License

This software is licensed under the MIT License. See the license file file for specifics.

Contributing

I am currently not looking for contributions. At this point, this is a practice project for me, and even if I were looking for outside help the test suite is nowhere near comprehensive enough for that yet. Sorry!