PRS-500 RasterFarian 2.5 Beta

[CHINYINGTSAI]

Thank you, this is really wonderful stuff!

[zeellig]

1. For those interested in a "legal" version of rasterfarian, please check out this link http://kmfstudio.com/rasterfarian_252_patch.html. This guy removed pdcat from the package and replaced it with window's copy. There doesn't appear to be any lost functionality.

2. If 1 can be verified by the moderators here, I suggest that you include the package on your wiki. This may encourage development on this most excellent pdf converter.

3. How can I make rasterfarian actually CUT the pages in half rather than use LRF landscape mode. I don't mind editing the code to accomplish this.

4. Ultimately, I'd like to use this for my new Kindle that I expect to come this week (yes, they are finally in stock). Can one of you help me reconfigure rasterfarian to output a reformatted PDF or better a kindle supported format (PRC, MOBI, AZW)?

Thanks!

[MovieHQ]

I am having a problem with the new copy command. I am on Vista and with file restrictions it will not allow files to be copied like this. I see the copy command run but the error "access Denied" comes back. At this point there is not copy to work on so the program does not work. I have tried changing the scrips to move it to a different location but that does not seem to work either. I have also set the copy command to run as administrator but no go. Any ideas?

[binstar]

It's a sad day when a piece of software can be considered "illegal" and cause such a reaction.

I wonder what kind of PDFs all of these outraged users are converting and what the publishers think.

Sorry if this is an unpopular opinion but people like medavidson absolutely disgust me. In school we called them hall monitors. I can understand the developer of the software requesting it be removed or even the owner of the site. But for some random guy to insert himself into the process is ridiculous. While it can be played off as moral outrage (in some kind of black & white, comic book world) what it really is is egoism followed by a heavy dose of haterade.

I just came here to download rasterfarian and now I have to jump through all these hoops to get it because someone decided to be the world's most insignificant whistle blower.

[medavidson]

binstar wrote:

"I can understand the developer of the software requesting it be removed or even the owner of the site"

Well, the owners of the site DID request for it to be removed... and if my actions disgust you, then they disgust you. As a professional software developer (and someone who advocates and promotes open source), I simply don't believe it is right to use commercial software without the proper license to do so. Ignoring copyright laws is no way to go.

Mark

[quantamix]

Hi,

Does anybody knows where I can download Rasterfarian v2.5? or Rasterfarian v3?

Thanks in advance.

[talofo]

Hope he can resize the .PDF. I need a so Simple task, I have a pdf with to content to small, i need to print it, bigger. I can't found a solution! Hope RasterFarian could help me

[talofo]

Originally Posted by alex_d

Editor's Note: These files have been blocked from being downloaded because it has been brought to our attention that the application as it currently exists includes an expired trial version of commercial software.


That's right. Back from a developmental hiatus, I bring to you the latest version of PDFRasterFarian (now renamed simply RasterFarian)!

Many new things have changed. Gone is AutoImager. Gone even, gasp, is ImageMagick! Also, RasterFarian now behaves much more like a normal Windows program. This probably isn't a big deal to those of you who were able to figure out how to get it to work before, but it'll be a big help to newbies. Lastly, it's now possible to start converting multiple files, have them get into a neat queue, and finish automatically. Very helpful, given the amount of time a single conversion takes.


On the image quality front, I've discovered a wonderful packaged called NetPBM. This thing sits in imagemagick's shadow, but it's actually much more powerful and has a much better interface. Not to mention MUCH, MUCH better documentation. Seriously, WTF is up with imagemagick's documentation?

NetPBM is able to do dilate. It also fixes some nagging issues with how imagemagick did the shrink and color reduction operations. E.g., instead of refiltering the image before resizing, netpbm lets me do a simple pixel mix. The output ends up sharper. Also, imagemagick had this perverse color-reducing scheme where it would try to find the four "optimal" colors for a palettized image. There was no way to tell it "no, you stupid crap, the sony reader can only use THESE four colors." With NetPBM, it's easy to specify this explicitly. So gone is the gray snow you'd sometimes see on backgrounds which should've been white (and on fields that should've been black).

NetPBM also introduced me to a new image processing step. Instead of sharpening, I now do "edge enhancement." The results are considerably sharper and clearer compared to 2.1.


On the installation front, we now have an installer that copies files into Program Files and sets up Start Menu entries. If you call pdfrasterfarian from the start menu, you'll get an ordinary windows dialog box asking you which file you'd like to convert and where to save it. Hopefully, in the future no one will try to install and ask "how do i install it" or "how do i run it."


On the queueing front, you can now start multiple conversions. They won't all happen simultaneously (taking up a huge amount of ram). Rather, they'll wait for eachother to complete and then start by themselves. It all happens automatically (with a couple new questions) when you run multiple instances simultaneously. Previously, if you tried that the program would simply fail.


Many things on the original "todo" and "known issues" are getting crossed off. I'm still planning to add DjVu support (probably before this comes out of beta) and also raw images input support (this one will be a tad more annoying). One-click profiles are in the works (but i'm not sure if there's a point since you can just configure the defaults and use Simple mode. try this, it's nice.)

How can we download RasterFarian?

[NatCh]

Well, seeing as we took the app down in the first place to avoid being in violation of the relevant copyright laws ... do you really think we're going to turn around and post another location to download it from?

As it happens, I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to do so, since I've never tried to find it anywhere else myself.



Since the only traffic in this thread for the past several months has been to ask where to download the files we took down so that we wouldn't be facilitating downloading of infringing files, or ranting about us doing so, that it's well past time to just close the thing.