Archive for the 'software' Category

Calibre is not only an E-book Library Management Application

calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:

  • Library Management
  • calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.
    calibre can sort the books in your library by: Title, Author, Date added, Date published, Size, Rating, Series, etc.
    In addition, it supports extra searchable metadata:

    • Tags: A flexible system for categorizing your collection however you like
    • Comments: A long form entry that you can use for book description, notes, reviews, etc.

    You can easily search your book collection for a particular book. calibre supports searching any and all of the fields mentioned above. You can construct advanced search queries by clicking the helpful “Advanced search” button to the left of the search bar.
    You can export arbitrary subsets of your collection to your hard disk arranged in a fully customizable folder structure.
    Finally, calibre will even go out onto the internet to find book metadata based on existing title/author or ISBN information. It can download various types of metadata and covers for your books, automatically. The metadata system is written using plugins so that different types of metadata sources can be supported in the future.

  • E-book conversion
  • calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats can be found here .
    The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.

  • Syncing to e-book reader devices
  • calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices, the complete list of which is here . Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.

  • Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
  • calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. Examples of supported news sites include:

    • The New York Times
    • The Wall Street Journal
    • The Economist
    • Time
    • Newsweek
    • The Guardian
    • ESPN
    • and many, many more…

    calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plugin based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!
    If you are interested in adding support for a news site, read the User Manual . Once you have successfully created a new recipe, you can share it with other users by posting it in the calibre forum or sending it to the calibre developers for inclusion in calibre.

  • Comprehensive e-book viewer
  • calibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.

  • Content server for online access to your book collection
  • calibre has a built-in web server that allows you to access your ebook collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and downloaded news to you automatically. It has support for mobile devices, so you can browse your collection and download books from your smartphone, Kindle, etc.

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PhantomJS Static Windows Version with SSL support

From Google Code of PhantomJS , you can download PhantomJS 1.2.0 Windows executable – Static. More compact, but does not support https. and said, this version is statically linked, therefore HTTPS is not supported. For HTTPS support please download the dynamic version. (You can only download dynamic build version now.)

With some effort, I compile a static version with https/ssl support, if you like it, please download here.

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, SVG. The official web site is phantomjs.org.

PhantomJS is cross-platform, it can be compiled for Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. PhantomJS scripts can be written in JavaScript or CoffeeScript.

Here a 14-line PhantomJS script which finds pizzeria in New York (using Google Places), along with the address and the telephone number:

page = new WebPage()
page.open 'http://www.google.com/m/local?site=local&q=pizza+in+new+york',
  (status) ->
    if status isnt 'success'
      console.log 'Unable to access network'
    else
      results = page.evaluate ->
        pizza = []
        list = document.querySelectorAll 'div.bf'
        for item in list
          pizza.push(item.innerText)
        return pizza
      console.log results.join('\n')
    phantom.exit()

Get the code and build it, and then enjoy some more simple and advanced examples, covering:

  • running regression tests from command line
  • getting driving direction
  • showing weather forecast conditions
  • finding pizza in New York
  • looking up approximate location based on IP address
  • pulling the list of seasonal food
  • producing PDF version of a Wikipedia article
  • rasterizing SVG to image

For questions and feedback, please post to phantomjs mailing-list.

PhantomJS is based on Qt. There are two implementations, using C++ and Python.

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PdfArticle Windows Version Releases

PdfArticle is a pdf viewer for mathematical articles (GNU/GPL v3). Its goal is to present for eah page the images of its references, such as bibliographies, theorems and equations.

PdfArticle Screenshot

PdfArticle  is a Qt4 application, depends on Poppler-Qt to render PDF,  so it is cross platform application, but the author said

For now it is only available for Linux, due to the dependance of Poppler. A compile version for Windows and/or Mac would be greatly welcome, and also debian and redhat packages :)

With the help of the last version MinGW cross compiling environment, I successfully compiled a Windows x86(32-bit) version. and have tested on Windows 64-bit, and please download here.

P.S. If you want to download Linux version package (Debian/Ubuntu,Redhat,Mandriva) or source code, please visit here.

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