PDF Support

No. No plans at the moment.

You could very easily export your PDF as a sequence of images and add them
to a region.

Alex

Chris <email address hidden> wrote:

New question #102312 on Xibo:
https://answers.launchpad.net/xibo/+question/102312

Is there currently any way to display PDFs? If not that would be a nice
feature. Scrolling just like an RSS feed or something of the sort. Maybe
page by page every so many seconds?

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Another option to display PDF files in Xibo is to convert the file to flash, using pdf2swf from GPL project SWFTools (http://www.swftools.org/).

I have implemented automatic PDF Support for Xibo 1.2.2 for Windows (Linux should be similar).
It uses ImageMagick and FFMPEG(included in ImageMagick):
- I installed ImageMagick (Important: Register to environment variables in installation)
- installed Ghostscript (for pdf conversion)
- I used the video.module.php and renamed everything to pdf
- modified temporary file handling (first convert every page to .jpg, then if one page save image, if more pages convert to avi with ffmpeg)
- modified module.class.php in function as_xml (changed type to "image" or "video" if $this->type=="pdf"). I had to add an attribut $cout to the module for it to decide if "image" or "video" should be used. This attribut is used in pdf.module.php too.
- and inserted this new module into the db( Module=PDF;Enabled=1;RegionSpecific=0;Description=PDF;ImageUri="img/forms/pdf.gif(just made one);SchemaVersion=1;ValidExtension=pdf)

Works stable, looks ok (not optimal) and all functions (like add, edit, delete) seem to work.

If you like to use it, please let me know how to upload it. Would be nice if 1.4 could have it.

GOTO

GOTO

Hi I would be interested in implementing this - my Head also would like pdf's to display and being able to do this within xibo would be great. I'd appreciate some more info if you can spare the time?(the modify temporary file handling process particularly) I'll be working on it again this weekend, so I'll let you know how it goes. I use the Linux client, so will be interesting to see if the same method works.

Cheers

Daniel

It would be excellent if you could get this into a BZR branch here on Launchpad - we can then consider it for merging into 1.5 (missed the boat on 1.4 release).

I'm not exactly clear what you have done so far GOTO... it seems like you are using the server end to convert the PDF to some other format before saving it to the Xibo database?

I think that Daniel was intending to modify the clients so that they could natively display PDF files.

Hi Dan

I guess the server is where GOTO has made the changes, only mentioned the client cos I misread GOTO's msg.(it was getting late!) I'm using CENTOS 6.2 for the server and I'll see if I can implement the same changes and let you know how I get on. Be warned tho, I'm no coder, so I'm not expecting much progress!

Do you think this sort of functionality should be client side? I suppose the clients ought to have the capacity to manage the conversion, whereas resources may be more thinly spread on a server.

Daniel

I guess I don't understand what GOTO has done - his description would imply that he has converted PDF files into Video files from the server end... I guess I don't see how that will work.

If the PDF file is converted to a video/image file then no further modifications would be necessary...

Although I guess an alternative would be to get the client to open up a PDF in the browser, or embed some sort of PDF viewer.