Pdf2htmlEX: A PDF to HTML converter

http://coolwanglu.github.com/pdf2htmlEX/

by lispython • 14 years ago

107 61 14 years ago

coolwanglu.github.com

mgualt9• 14 years ago

Very interesting - It would be great if the author could outline his overall goals and design ideas.

What are some of the constraints on the PDF in terms of page dimensions or configuration?

How is the math translation done? Does it use MathML or something else?

For me, the interest is that I can now go LaTeX ---> Webpage.

agilebyte• 14 years ago

Have you tried wiki.lyx.org/Tools/ELyXer for tex to html? I have used it on my dissertation and was mightily impressed (I am easily impressed):

http://patterns.radekstepan.com/

mgualt9• 14 years ago

From my point of view, that's not really tex to html. That's tex markup to html. I am talking about using the latex software, whose purpose is to do typesetting. The amazing thing about this converter is that it takes the latex OUTPUT and produces html.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

Hello, I'm the author. MATHML is not used. PDF is rendered with only HTML/CSS, and a few JS.

Please comment at github such that I can see it in time.

mgualt9• 14 years ago

Amazing - I am attempting to install this on mac osx lion -- it is taking a lot of time because of the dependencies. With so many dependencies the probability of failure is very high. Let's hope it works.

I urge you to find a way to allow people to install your software more easily.

I managed to get it to install (after about an hour and a half of tinkering. However I get "Segmentation fault" when I try running it:

pdf2htmlEX --debug=1 test.pdf

temporary dir: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv

Preprocessing: ....

Working: Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__css

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__pages

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/p1.png

Install font: (29 0) -> f1

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/f1.pfa

Segmentation fault: 11

mgualt9• 14 years ago

I was able to install

cmake, fontforge and libpoppler with homebrew,

gcc-4.7 using

https://github.com/sol-prog/gcc-4.7-binary

tincholio2• 14 years ago

     sudo apt-add-repository ppa:coolwanglu/pdf2htmlex   
     sudo apt-get update
     sudo apt-get install pdf2htmlex

I haven't yet tried to build on mac os, but in ubuntu it was trivially simple.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

The problem is that I don't have a machine with Mac. Which version of fontforge have you installed?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

I cannot reproduce it with a 20110222 version of fontforge.

Would you mind send me the pdf file, for me to debug?

Does it always crash, with other pdf files?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

It's confirmed by some guys using Mac. We are working on this. Please hold on, and join the discussion on github if you like. Thanks for your patience.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

The compiling problem should have been fixed. Could you please try the latest master branch, see if it works well or maybe fail at one assertion?

tincholio2• 14 years ago

This is awesome stuff! Thanks for sharing this.

antidoh• 14 years ago

Damn, that's cool. Somewhat full circle too, in light of the many pdf printer drivers in use today.

davidp• 14 years ago

This is clever, thanks for sharing.

When viewing the output (using the "computer science cheat sheet") I found some differences between browsers that I thought HN readers might find interesting. These aren't primarily issues with your tool, hence posting here.

- I primarily use Chrome (21) as my browser, and the cheat sheet renders very quickly. I noticed it doesn't seem to render some equations correctly (see bad operators here[1]).

- FF (15.0.1) seems to render more correctly, but it is glacially slow. The whole app (chrome and all) freezes for several seconds between clicks while the document is loaded in any tab.

- IE (9) renders the same page both correctly and quickly.

[1] http://imageshack.us/a/img88/3754/chromeformulas.png

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

The problem happens only on Windows.

For Chrome, if you zoom in, I think everything should be fine.But Chrome is lack of antialias in Windows.

I'm trying to solve the problem of Firefox.

mih• 14 years ago

Just to add to the compatibility list, all examples render perfectly on Opera 12, albeit a bit slow.

MartinMond• 14 years ago

Hi! This is an incredible project. I'm just curious, you mention that crocodoc has been "consulted" for this project.

Did you ask them how they do their HTML5 conversion or what exactly do you mean by that?

Anyway, a big Thanks for creating this project!

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

I meant I took a look at a HTML page generated by crocodoc. Their approach was interesting.

fudged71• 14 years ago

This is fantastic! I've been using LaTeX for a while now, and nothing has really outputted HTML anywhere near this quality. I'm very impressed!

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

What about complex vectors with gradients etc?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

Just go head, try and be pleased.

neurostimulant• 14 years ago

Very cool! This is exactly what I need. I'm going to play with it for a while.

SeanDav• 14 years ago

Sorry for the very noob question, but how do you actually get this to run on a windows XP system?

I just want to run a quick test, but it seems I have to build the project - is that correct?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

You may build it with CYGWIN.

lectrick• 14 years ago

Step 1: Only use Windows for games. Fire up a *nix VM, fullscreen it and get real work done in the big boy's open source developer land :)

guilloche• 14 years ago

Amazing, Can the same trick be used for latex=>html? It would be better than tth which is also very good.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

of course you can compile latex to pdf first

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Is it possible to reflow the page, at least in simple cases like 2-column documents? That would be awesome for mobile.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

That's beyond the scope of pdf2htmlEX.

mgualt9• 14 years ago

Indeed, and I hope it stays out of scope forever. The idea of reflow is anathema to the idea of typesetting, as far as I can see.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

Technically impressive, but what systems can render HTML and JS but not PDF?

rabidsnail• 14 years ago

Firefox and IE on Windows.

nilliams• 14 years ago

There are also various use-cases for doing this as part of a larger product. Say you need to take a customer's crappy PDFs & reformat them for display within a web app, on a public display or to send as an HTML email. You could use this tool, convert to HTML, then drop in your own CSS stylesheet to reformat it. If your customer had many of said crappy PDFs you could no-doubt automate the whole process.

Needless to say I had to do something pretty similar recently, though I ended up having to ask the customer to provide better source data than the PDFs they initially sent. This tool could have been very useful at the time, hope to give it a spin soon.

akie• 14 years ago

I'm very impressed. Can you post some more examples online, some non-technical PDFs for example? I'm curious how well it does 'generic' PDFs (for example magazine layouts).

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

What do you suggest? I don't have one in my mind now.

peterlai• 14 years ago

I'm flattered the author mentions Crocodoc. Crocodoc is hiring by the way if anyone wants to hack on stuff like this full time: https://crocodoc.com/jobs/

Genmutant• 14 years ago

Has somebody already built it for Windows and could upload the binary?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

I've tried and succeeded with CYGWIN. But no idea how can I distribute the package with the dependencies.

fpp• 14 years ago

Looks pretty neat - saving it as html file works great, but you can't print the docs (in Chrome print to pdf only shows a scroll bar, in FF it does not properly format).

Great work anyway - I'll have a deeper look.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

Yeah, known issue. Currently I've no idea how to fix it :(

corry• 14 years ago

Very cool, definitely an area where there needs to be lots of work done.

What is browser compatibility like? Is IE8 supported?

Edit: removed reference to HTML5/canvas, didn't see any in the source HTML.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

AFAIK, IE8 doesn't support enough HTML5 stuffs, so no. IE9 should be OK

wesley• 14 years ago

What's I'd like to see is a library that can extract multi-column text into a readable format. From looking at the source of the HTML here, they're doing it with absolute positioning. Nothing wrong with that for display purposes, but I'd like to have a library that can extract text meaningfully from a multi-column PDF.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

The pdftotext tool from xpdf does something like that. One option pads the output text with spaces to roughly match the layout of the pdf (the -layout option) and another option just strips the pdf formatting out (the -raw option).

Depending on the structure of the pdf, one or the either may give better output (the -layout output would need some more processing).

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

Neat idea, make it generate epub and it moves the pdf->e-book ball a bit further down the field. Looking at the source to this page view-source:http://coolwanglu.github.com/pdf2htmlEX/demo/geneve.html it looks like you can't yet generate a font from the characters, rather it uses the 'font trick' to put images on the page. That makes the epub problem harder (which really really wants fonts not images it seems)

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

What do you mean no fonts? You can try to copy the text out, which is not possible if images are used.

ChuckMcM3• 14 years ago

"           "

There I cut and pasted a quote from the document linked into this response. What do you see? I see a bunch of boxes.

additive• 14 years ago

Is it faster than pdftohtml?

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

Probably not, as font conversion is slow. pdftohtml does not extract fonts for now.

coolwanglu23• 14 years ago

Please try with commit f02e1d4 if any of you cannot build it on Mac

Pdf2htmlEX: A PDF to HTML converter

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