Pdfgrep is a tool to search text in PDF files. It works similar to grep.

Pdfgrep is an open source project developed by Hans-Peter Deifel, but only Linux compiled version can be found, after some tested, I found it is really a great project, so I decided to compile it for windows.

compiler, I use MXE, it is a powerful MinGW Cross compiler, it let me easily port many projects to windows.

based on the  git version of Pdfgrep and poppler-0.20.3, and some modification of the source code, I successfully compiled the windows version.

From CloudFoundry Blog, we got an exciting message,

Developers can now use vert.x, a framework for highly scalable web applications, with CloudFoundry.com.

Because compare to other event-driven application frameworks, vert.x performances pretty great and Cloud Foundry has been a leader in providing an open Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS) software developed by VMware released under the terms of the Apache License 2.0. It is primarily written in Ruby. The source and development community for this software is available at cloudfoundry.org

Cloud Foundry is also a hosted service offered by VMware that runs using the Cloud Foundry software. This service can be accessed at cloudfoundry.com.

From Cloud Foundry Blog,Deploying vert.x Applications to Cloud Foundry,

vert.x is a framework that builds on event-driven architecture and asynchronous I/O, similar to Node.js, but utilizes JVM’s internal capabilities to handle multiple processes and inter-process communications. Using Java threads, vert.x applications can easily scale over available cores making better use of available resources.

vert.x is a community project sponsored by VMware.

reference,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Foundry

Asynchronous Event-driven Network Application Framework:vert.x, Node.js or Netty

Deploying vert.x Applications to Cloud Foundry

Calibre is not only a free and open source e-book library management application, but also a power E-book converter, 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 are as follow,
Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, DJVU, EPUB, FB2, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ
Output Formats: AZW3, EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, HTMLZ, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ

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.

but today I will introduce another free and open source software that can easily convert PDF to MOBI or EPUB, it is PdfMasher.

PdfMasher is a tool to convert PDF articles (newspaper, academic) to MOBI or EPUB documents. Most ebook readers support PDF files natively, but it’s often a real pain to read those documents because we don’t have font size control over the document like we have with native ebooks. In many cases, we have to use the zooming feature and it’s just a pain. Another drawback of PDFs on ebook readers is that annotations are not supported.

There are already tools to convert PDFs to ebooks like Calibre, but what they do is that they try to guess the role of each piece of text in the PDF (and that’s if you’re lucky). I think that in all but the simplest cases, it’s a mistake to think that anything short of an AI can do that kind of guessing.

Enter PdfMasher. PdfMasher asks the user about the role of each piece of text, and does it in an efficient manner. Your PDF has a header on each page and you don’t want them to litter your text? Sort text elements by Y-position (thus grouping them all together), shift select the elements and flag them as ignored. They will not appear on your final HTML. Your PDF has footnotes on many pages? Sort your elements by text content (thus grouping all elements with the text starting with a number together) and flag them as footnotes. They will be moved to the end of the document, and PdfMasher will try to create hyperlinks to footnote references.