wc.pageturner 1.0b2

A Plone product that provides the PDF viewer FlexPaper.

Introduction

This package is a Plone product that will add a Page Turner view to the PDF File content type. The result is that you’ll be able to view PDFs much in the same way you can view them on scribd.com. It uses the open source project, Flex Paper, to display the PDFs. You can find information about it at http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/.

Requirements

This product requires that you have pdf2swf installed. pdf2swf is included with SWFTools. I suggest you stick with the package managers to install this as there are some dependencies that need to be installed.

If you’re using Ubuntu Lucid, the swftools package should now be in the package repositories now:

# sudo apt-get install swftools

On Mac, if you have MacPorts installed you can,

# sudo port install swftools

If all else fails, you can download SWF tools from http://www.swftools.org/ and install it yourself.

How-To

• Add your PDF as a file to your Plone site.

• Edit the various setting of the Page turner by clicking the Page Turner Settings button that is now available

• To turn off auto-selecting of the page turner layout for PDF files, go to ZMI -> portal_properties -> site_properties and customize the page_turner_auto_select_layout property to off.

Tested With

• Plone 3 and 4

• Also works with Blob storage transparently so the converted PDFs aren’t stored in the ZODB

Credits

Credit goes to Wildcard corp and Talin Senner for sponsoring and designing the product and Nathan Van Gheem for coding it.

Asynchronous Conversion

With large PDFs the conversion to Flex Paper can take some time. If you have plone.app.async installed and configured, this conversion will now happen in asynchronously.

Changelog

1.0b2 ~ unreleased

• added support for plone.app.async. Flex Paper conversion can now happen in the background. [vangheem]

1.0b1 ~ 2010-11-29

• update flexpaper to 1.4.0 [vangheem]

• auto select page turner view for pdf files now and make configurable via portal_properties -> site_properties [vangheem]

• better error checking when converting PDFs. pdf2swf still seems very touchy for converting some PDFs… [vangheem]

• Added progressive loading, print enabled, full screen visible, search tools visible and cursor tools visible options [vangheem]

0.6

• Fix for storing blobs. [davisagli]

• Don’t swallow exceptions while converting; log them. [davisagli]

• Use the subprocess module instead of popen2 to communicate with pdf2swf. [davisagli]

• Protect the page turner settings page with the “Modify view template” permission. [davisagli]

• Avoid purging existing view methods for the File type on installation. [davisagli]

0.5 ~ 2010-05-21

• Initial release

Road Map

1.0

• option to automatically enable the page turner view if PDF format is detected for a new file

• support other formats besides PDF–is this possible?