Download Ubuntu Packaging Guide (PDF, Epub, HTML In A Single .deb)

Daniel Holbach maintains a daily builds PPA for a project called "Ubuntu Packaging Guide" which aims to provide a set of articles for working with debian packages and Launchpad, uploading your GPG key to Launchpad (required to create a PPA), fixing bugs, getting the code via BZR, working with a PPA and so on. The guide is in its early stages (currently version 0.1.0) so it's not complete but it's already quite useful.

The guide is not meant to replace the Debian documentation but to provide Ubuntu-specific instructions:

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide is a set of articles that should help you to get involved with packaging and development of Ubuntu. It's not meant to replace other great documentation like the Debian New Maintainer's Guide or the Debian policy, but serve as a starting point with easy and simple to understand articles.

The package provides PDF, Epub and single / multiple HTML files but to get these you'll need to either add the PPA or download the .deb.

The PPA currently provides Ubuntu Packaging Guide packages for Ubuntu 11.04 only but it might get packages for older Ubuntu versions too (there was some bug which prevented the packages from building on older Ubuntu versions and then the packages were deleted). Add the PPA and install Ubuntu Packaging Guide in Ubuntu 11.04 using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-packaging-guide-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide

If you're not using Ubuntu 11.04, you can download the Ubuntu Packaging Guide .deb from HERE. But remember: the guide is constantly updated so to get the latest changes you should add the PPA!

Once installed, open Nautilus and navigate to /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-packaging-guide and you should find a file called "ubuntu-packaging-guide.pdf.gz" - you can open this with Evince. You'll also find a folder called "epub" in which you'll find an epub format for the Ubuntu Packaging guide (look for ubuntu-packaging-guide.epub.gz), as well as two folders which provide the Ubuntu Packaging Guide in HTML format.

Also see: An Introduction To Debian Pagaging PDF guide

gImageReader (Tesseract OCR GUI) Gets Multipage Recognition Support

gImageReader (runs on Linux and Windows) is a GUI for tesseract-ocr, a free software optical character recognition (OCR) engine which you can use to extract text from PDF documents or images.

gImageReader allows you to select columns, part of a document, spell check the output and more but it didn't recognize a whole document at once. But the latest gImageReader 0.9 adds multipage-recognition support for multipage PDF. You can also set gImageReader to extract the text from a page range if you don't need it to recognize a whole document.

Besides this very useful (and much needed!) new feature, gImageReader 0.9 also comes with:

• new language profiles: chinese, korean, japanese, hebrew, arabic, croatian
• all formats supported by gdk_pixbuf to file filter for open dialog
• option to cancel the recognition
• fixed auto-installing new dictionaries (new dictionaries would not appear in main language selector until program restart)
• many other minor improvements and bug fixes

How about the speed you may ask. Well, in my test, gImageReader was able to recognize a 36 page PDF document in 1,10 minutes (on a kind of slow computer I have at work).

For a slightly more detailed post on gImageReader which also includes installing the latest Tesseract OCR in Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04 (which comes with more languages and much improved recognition but is experimental!), see: Extract Text From PDFs And Images With gImageReader, A Tesseract OCR GUI

Download gImageReader (.deb, .rpm and .exe files available)

Thanks to lffl.org for the news!

Edit PDF Documents In Linux With PDF Mod (Remove Or Add Pages, Rotate, Reorder PDF Files)

PDF Mod is a great application for editing PDF documents which can be used to remove or add pages to existing PDF files, export images, rotate, reorder, edit the metadata (subject, title, author) and so on.

Sure, there are some more powerful command line tools like pdftk but not everybody enjoys the command line so if you want a GUI for this, try PDF Mod.

PDFMod is really easy to use: when you open a PDF, all the pages are displayed in a grid and you can for instance open a second PDF file and drag and drop some pages from one PDF document to another. Right clicking a page lets you remove, rotate, extract it or export the image (if available). You can of course edit multiple pages at once by selecting them the usual way (holding down the Control key) or even select all odd / even pages as well as based on a matching pattern.

PDF Mod 0.9 which has been released earlier this month (and so it's not available in the official Ubuntu repositories but there's a PPA for it!) comes with a cool new feature: bookmark editing (outlines):

The new version also fixes some important bugs and brings improved speed (removing many pages is a lot faster now).

Install PDF Mod in Ubuntu

PDF Mod is available in the official Ubuntu repositories but to get the latest version you must use the PDF Mod Ubuntu PPA. 

Add the PPA and install PDF Mod 0.9 in Ubuntu using the commands below (or add the PPA using a GUI tool like Y PPA Manager and then install it from the Ubuntu Software Center):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pdfmod-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pdfmod

Also see: Highlight Text Or Annotate PDF Files In Ubuntu With Xournal

Do you use PDF Mod to edit PDF documents? Or maybe you know some better GUI tool for modifying PDF files? Let us know in the comments!

Firefox: Embedded PDFs With Evince (Using Mozplugger)

Mozplugger is a Firefox plugin that allows you to embed applications that handle various file types in Firefox.

In this post you'll see how to get embedded PDF files in Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4 (I've tested it in both) - like in Google Chrome (sort of) - using Evince, the Ubuntu default PDF reader.

Get embedded PDF files in Firefox using Evince

1. Install Mozplugger. Ubuntu users can simply click the button below:

Or copy/paste the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install mozplugger

2. Only for Ubuntu 10.10. In Ubuntu 11.04, it works without this step (and in fact it won't work if you apply this in Ubuntu 11.04): now you must edit the mozpluggerrc file. To do this, press ALT + F2 and enter:

gedit /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.mozilla/mozpluggerrc

(In the above command, replace "YOUR_USERNAME" with your username. No, using "~" doesn't work for the run dialog).

And in this file, paste the following:

application/pdf: pdf: PDF file
application/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
text/pdf: pdf: PDF file
text/x-pdf: pdf: PDF file
application/x-postscript: ps: PostScript file
application/postscript: ps: PostScript file
    repeat noisy swallow(evince) fill: evince "$file"

Now restart Firefox and try to open a PDF file. It should be embedded in Firefox using Evince if you've followed the steps correctly.

Thanks to hhlp @ AskUbuntu for the instructions.

Download "An Introduction to Debian Packaging" PDF Guide

An Introduction to Debian Packaging is a PDF created by Lucas Nussbaum, designed to tell you what you really need to know about Debian packaging, keeping a resonable size. The guide doesn't attempt to be complete but it's great if you want to start making your own .deb files or simply understand how the Debian packaging works.

Note: If you're using Chrome to open the PDF, the text is not readable because of the background. Download the PDF and open it in a PDF viewer instead and the font will look ok (or use Google Docs).

Download "An Introduction to Debian Packaging" PDF | Open the PDF with Google Docs.

For the full Debian packaging documentation, refer to The Debian New Maintainers' Guide or the Debian Policy Manual. There's also a small how-to on this available on WebUpd8: How To Create A .DEB Package [Ubuntu / Debian] (it's pretty basic but should be enough to get you started).

Highlight Text Or Annotate PDF Files In Ubuntu With Xournal

Xournal is an application for note taking or sketching and even though its page says it's a tool similar to Microsoft Windows Journal, Jarnal, Gournal, and NoteLab, I'd also add Foxit Reader to the list.

That's because even though its Sourceforge page doesn't mention this, Xournal can also be used as a lightweight PDF viewer and further more, it can be used to highlight text in PDF documents, make annotations and so on. However, please note that Xournal is not a PDF editor!

To use Xournal to highlight or add text to a PDF file, select File > Annotate PDF (you can also chose the usual File > Open, but make sure you then select to view all files, not just Xournal files) and select the PDF you want to annotate or highlight text.

Xournal cannot save a file in PDF format but you can easily select File > Export to PDF to achieve something similar so it's a viable solution for those who are looking for a reliable tool to annotate/highlight text in PDF files on Linux.

Xournal is available in the Ubuntu repositories and you can install it by clicking the link below (if you're reading this in a feed reader, the button won't work - you'll have to visit the post on WebUpd8 to use it):

If you prefer to install Xournal from the command line, open a terminal and copy/paste the following command:

sudo apt-get install xournal

[via AskUbuntu]

Nautilus Columns Update Brings PDF Support

Nautilus Columns is a Nautilus extension that adds music (mp3, WAV and FLAC) and EXIF metadata info to the Nautilus List View.

A new version of Nautilus Columns which adds PDF info (thanks to draxus) is available in the WebUpd8 PPA. This is very useful for those who have a lot of PDF files for which the title is not descriptive.

To display the PDF info, in Nautilus go to Edit > Preferences > List Columns and check "Artist" (Artist was used instead of Author to keep the Nautilus columns number low) and "Title", then navigate to a folder where you have some PDF files and change the Nautilus view to "List View". Please note that your PDF files need to have the author and title info available or else you'll get "n/a" in those fields.

Install Nautilus Columns

Nautilus Columns is available in the WebUpd8 PPA for Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick. Add the PPA and install Nautilus Columns using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nautilus-columns
nautilus -q

For more info on Nautilus Columns, see: Music And EXIF Metadata Information In Nautilus List View [Nautilus Columns Extension - PPA]

Thanks to draxus for the PDF support!

Download Compress PDF 1.4 (Nautilus Script) [Updated]

Compress PDF is a Nautilus script which uses ghostscript to compress PDF files and comes in 8 languages (English, Portuguese (pt-PT), Spanish (es-AR), Czech, French, Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Malayalam). The script lets you choose between 5 different compression levels: Screen-view only, Low Quality, Hight Quality, High Quality (Color Preserving) and Default.

Ricardo has just released an update (version 1.2) which fixes a bug that was causing metadata from the original PDF file (meaning author, title, creator) to be lost after compression.

Update: the post now links to Compress PDF 1.4 which comes with the following changes:

• Compress PDF now uses notify-osd to inform the user when the compression is completed, and automatically exits (useful for bigger files);
• Temporary files are now hidden;
• Saving and replacing the original PDF file with the compressed one works as expected;
• Fixed: If the user presses Cancel, at any time, Compress PDF will exit and temporary files will be removed;

To use the script, run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install zenity ghostscript
cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts
rm "Compress PDF" #in case you're using an older version
wget http://launchpad.net/compress-pdf/1.x/1.4/+download/Compress-PDF-1.4.tar.gz
tar zxvf Compress-PDF-1.4.tar.gz && rm Compress-PDF-1.4.tar.gz

Or manually download the script from HERE.

Thanks to Ricardo Ferreira for the script and the tip!

Quick Edit your PDF with PdfMod

Earlier and had taught them to edit pdf through OpenOffice. This option is very rare to find and highly valued, but has its flaws (misconfiguration of document format, for example) and is more complex.
So if you're a user looking for basic options, this program is going to attract attention. His name is PdfMod, and allows us to rearrange, rotate or add pages to our pdf document.

Couturier 0.5 - Join multiple PDF into one

Couturier is a Gnome application which allows us to merge several PDF files into one.
Lucid can install deb package you will find here.

Once installed you will find in Applications> Office> PDF Merger Couturier.

PDF Reader Free Nokia 5800 Ap

Application Title: PDF Reader Free Nokia 5800 Ap
Application Description: Be able to view .pdf files on your nokia 5800 without having to pay! This free application lets you view .pdf files on your nokia 5800 mobile phone.

Format: .wgz
Category: Aps
File Size: UnKnown
Download: HERE