PDF cropping software: BRISS

[laborg]

Hi!

I own a Cybook since two years and was bugged that there is no easy-to-use open-source software for cropping pdf files so the last couple of days I hacked something which might be usefull for other ebook users. Since its written in Java should run under Linux/Windows/MacOSX.

You can download the application from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

So if you want to make the best out of your 6 inch try BRISS ;-)

If the name offends your religious feelings I sure can think of a better one.

Waiting for feedback,
laborg

[laborg]

Hi!

I own a Cybook since two years and was bugged that there is no easy-to-use open-source software for cropping pdf files so the last couple of days I hacked something which might be usefull for other ebook users. Since its written in Java runs under Linux/Windows/MacOSX.

You can download the application from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

So if you want to make the best out of your 6 inch try BRISS ;-)

If the name offends your religious feelings I sure can think of a better one.

Waiting for feedback,
laborg

Btw.: Sorry for crossposting into NEWS forum. I think this post is better suited here.

[Guns4Hire]

I'll give it a try. I don't do PDF very often unless I absolutely have to. We will see how this works for the handful that I have.

[frabjous]

So if you want to make the best out of your 6 inch try BRISS ;-)

GROAN!

I'll give this a try. Not sure it offers anything not already offered by soPDF and some others, but I like that it's cross-platform, etc.

[laborg]

New version available! (0.0.2)

From the Changelog:
* Performance improvements
* Resolved Bugs:
#2999011 - Handling of rotated PDFs is implemented
#2999012 - Cropped rectangle is now limited to the preview image size

Have much fun!
Gerhard

[laborg]

In the build from last night there was a major bug, which prevented the tool from working like it should. This was fixed in release 0.0.3.

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Gerhard

[ab7vf]

Just a note, briss-0.0.3 fails when creating cluster 1 on loading pdf ..
hope dump below will help, Jim





Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException
at at.laborg.briss.MergedPanel.<init>(MergedPanel.jav a:50)
at at.laborg.briss.Briss$ClusterPagesTask.done(Briss. java:399)
at javax.swing.SwingWorker$5.run(Unknown Source)
at javax.swing.SwingWorker$DoSubmitAccumulativeRunnab le.run(Unknown Source)

[laborg]

Hi!

There's a new release (0.0.4)

Could you try it with the new version? I replaced the preview rendering engine with JPedal and therefore it should be more robust.

Greetings,
Gerhard

[ab7vf]

well, it still errors out at the same place as .3 and .2 .... 0.0.1 still works

nice program (0.0.1) though, it would be nice to be able to crop 2 column pdfs ... Thanks for your efforts so far though

Jim

[laborg]

Mhm... I found the bug but it will take me some time to create a fix... Thx for reporting!

[laborg]

Suprise! Another release (0.0.5)

No new functionality but got rid of two bugs.

Good night,
Gerhard

[ab7vf]

OK! Its working again .. ran about 20 conversions through it and no hiccups whatsoever..
Thanks for your effort on this, Jim

[laborg]

Hi all!

With release 0.0.6 you can now crop various regions of a page (=>multi colum support). The result will include a new page for every selected region. Since it's not a image based approach the resulting PDFs file size doesn't increase even if the cropped version has many more pages).

Good night,
Gerhard

[frabjous]

Fun little tool you've got here. Thanks a lot.

I have two feature requests.

Firstly, the tool strips the metadata from the PDF. (Subject, author, title, etc.) Is there any way it could be preserved? (Or even an option offered to add it if it's not there already?)

Secondly--although admittedly this might be very hard to implement--could there be an option to force all pages to be the same size? Suppose, e.g., you're cropping a two column PDF. Unless you've got steady hands, probably the boxes you select won't be precisely the same, which might result in a slight zoom-level variation on devices that zoom each page to fit the device, which could be distracting. You could, e.g., force all pages into the size of the largest selection.

A less alternative to this might be to show the dimensions of each selection box while you were selecting the region, so you could manually ensure that they were the same.

But this is a great tool, and I'm happy to have it, even without these features.

[laborg]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Firstly, the tool strips the metadata from the PDF. (Subject, author, title, etc.) Is there any way it could be preserved? (Or even an option offered to add it if it's not there already?)

Secondly--although admittedly this might be very hard to implement--could there be an option to force all pages to be the same size? Suppose, e.g., you're cropping a two column PDF. Unless you've got steady hands, probably the boxes you select won't be precisely the same, which might result in a slight zoom-level variation on devices that zoom each page to fit the device, which could be distracting. You could, e.g., force all pages into the size of the largest selection.

I wasn't aware of the fact that it cuts away the metadata - i will have to look at that.
The second feature is actually one I've already implemented in an earlier version but dropped it. I will try to solve it for 0.0.7.

greetings,
Gerhard