Tools – Page 6 – Learning (Lib)Tech

A Brief Look at Summon

Summon is Serials Solutions’ web scale discovery tool. I think so far, it looks pretty good. It has all the things you’d want these days in your searches including:

sidebar with different options to refine search
clean, easy to use interface
save citations to folder and export
advance search, including ISBN for books

Currently, all records in the catalogue, institutional repository, and journal articles have been included. There’s also a locations refinement category to refine to a specific branch for catalogue materials.

It’ll be interesting to see what our users (including staff) think.

Quick Edit/Add-on: Seems like the major criticism I’ve heard is that it does not do known-item (that is you know what you’re looking for) searches well, but as my supervisor has explained, that’s not the purpose of a discovery tool. If you want to looking for something you know in a library, you use the source that will help you look for that. Some people might say “but look at google, it can do both well”, but even google scholar is unlikely to give you a book if you only enter a couple of words when you’re looking for a book (obviously that’s not true in all cases).

PDF Batch Automation (PDF to Image and PDF Merge)

EDIT: I’ve been reminded/informed that this only works in Windows (or MS-DOS anyway) since it uses .bat files. The suggestion if you’re using other OSs is to use php (but really you can use anything) to automate the command.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat (even if they haven’t actually used it). It’s a nice GUI if you want to edit PDFs, but at least as far as I know, it does not do any batch or automation work. For a digital images project, there’s a lot of automation work that needs to be done and for image to image conversion, I was using Photoshop, but then I started dealing with PDFs. Thus, it was only natural to turn to GhostScript.

PDF to Image
So, I don’t really get any credit for this, because it’s already out there and the variables are well explained. So if you want to turn all the pages of your PDF into images, check out this Danzels Internets post. My case was a little different because I only wanted the first page turned into an image as a thumbnail for an entire file and then for an entire folder. I also prefer to do any image modification (even batch) in an image program.

@echo off
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO gswin32 -sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOUTPUTFILE=%%Z.jpg -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE %%Z

So, here the major changes are “gswin32” because I use the Windows version, and the “-dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1” so that the first and last page it processes is page 1. You can change the output file name too, so I changed it in such a way that it takes the original file name and adds the .jpg extension.

PDF Merge
This is kind of a side note, because I didn’t need this for my project, but I recently downloaded some articles that for some reason had each section in a separate PDF. So, I get no credit for this one either as I got this one from Real’s How-to on Merging PDFs. I put this in here only for possible improvements of what’s presented on that site.

For the merging of PDFs in a directory, for the [merge.bat], you’re supposed to have this code:

@echo off
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO IF NOT %%Z==1.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged2.pdf call merge2.bat %%Z

Maybe it’s clear to other people, but the “1.pdf” is the name of the first pdf. I found that the subsequent ones will be added in alphanumeric order. Also, if you happen not to change the code, it will throw an error and insert a blank page at the beginning.

PDF2Wiki Conversion Comparison

So, some people may ask, why are you trying to convert PDF to Wiki? PDF is usually the last step in the process, so just use the original document. My response would naturally be, what if you don’t have the original document?

A Two-Step Process
Through my searching and reading on the topic, it seems there is no PDF2Wiki Converter. Every site that I have read explains converting the PDF to one of: DOC, RTF, HTML, XML first then to wiki format.

PDF2HTML
I tried a number of PDF to HTML programs, but none of them worked to my satisfaction. Most of them only converted simple formatting, such as bold and italics. Adobe has an online conversion tool. It’s better than some of the others I’ve tried as it interprets lists and such. The resulting code is rather ugly and a lot of the code would need to be stripped before using a HTML to Wiki converter. See my previous post on HTML2Wiki for a couple of tools on tidying or stripping HTML code.

PDF2DOC
I found that a much better alternative was converting the PDF to a DOC/RTF file since it’s a lot simpler and some formatting might be lost, but you won’t have a lot of needless code that might mess up your wiki page. There are a lot of online tools that provide a PDF to DOC/RTF service, however, again, they only tend to do basic formatting. Adobe Acrobat does a really good job, because it will change lists into formatted lists (instead of normal text). The major downside of course is that Acrobat is a paid program though there is a 30-day trial.

Conclusion
I had a lot of problems in particular with PDF to HTML, so I thought PDF to DOC/RTF is simply. Honestly though, unless you have a PDF file which is really long and has a lot of simple formatting (bold, italics, etc.), if you cannot get your hands on Acrobat, then I suggest simply copy/paste (or alternatively save as a text file) and manually formatting it in the wiki’s editing box. Of course this depends on the wiki you’re using because ones that don’t have a toolbar to help you quickly format might be a bit of a pain. Someone please let me know if you have found a better method!

DOC2Wiki (Word2Wiki) Converters Comparison

So to continue on ways to convert existing documents to wiki code, next is formatted text documents, which is typically word DOC files, but may also be something like RTF files.

Most sites I found actually just instructed people to use a 2 step conversion. From Word to HTML and then to wiki code. While this may work, it’s much less efficient and I can imagine more things are lost in the process. Admittedly, the converters that I have found are all geared towards MediaWiki, so if you’re using a different wiki then these converters may not work so well. Nevertheless, MediaWiki provides a list of Word to Wiki converters the most basic of which does not seem to be specifically geared to MediaWiki.

OpenOffice Sun Wiki Publisher Plugin (MAC and Windows compatible, not sure about other platforms)
(the wiki converter is built-in, the publishing part of it is optional)
The downside of OpenOffice is that it does not always interpret word documents very well. Embedded images tend to turn into hex code (ex. ffd8ffe000104a46494600010201 etc.) and tables aren’t always interpreted correctly either. The one I tried turned into overlapping text. So, in part, the usefulness of the outputted wiki code will depend on how well OpenOffice has read the word DOC itself, but it should handle ODT and RTF just fine.

Word2MediaWikiPlus Macro (Windows Only)
Word is the better choice for documents that OpenOffice can’t seem to handle very well. There is also a Word2MediaWiki Macro which is easier to use, but does not convert tables or deal with images very well.

Special Characters
For the OpenOffice plugin, ‘special characters’ (used loosely here) sometimes turn into weird symbols or random special characters. As with the HTML converters from the last post, something like ’ (not straight apostrophe) gets changed into ‚Äô, or a bullet point (which isn’t recognized to be in a bulleted list) turns into ‚Ä¢.
The Word2MediaWikiPlus (W2MWP) converter is better at dealing with special characters. The macro will simply insert the character as is and at times put a nowiki tag around it, but regardless, it displays just fine.

Text Boxes
For some reason, the W2MWP plugin turns text boxes into a single cell table and then repeats the same text again as regular text (not inside a table). The OpenOffice plugin strips the text of formatting and leaves it as regular text in the wiki output.

Tables
When tables are interpreted correctly, I think the OpenOffice plugin does a better job overall. The W2MWP macro is better at keeping formatting, such as colours and border style (below right), but OpenOffice one seems to interpret things inside a table better, such as type of lists (below left). (It’s supposed to be a bulleted list, not a numbered list.)

Needs Good Original Document Formatting
In both cases, the usefulness of the wiki code will depend on how well the original document was formatted. For example, in one of the documents I tested, a number of the number and bullet lists were not formatted as such, but instead, numbers and bullets were just manually added. In both plugins, they were considered to be regular text with a ‘special’ character or number at the beginning of it.

Conclusion
Whether the Word2Wiki or the OpenOffice plugin is better depends on your priorities. OpenOffice seems to interpret lists and text boxes better, and doing a replace all for characters that weren’t interpreted properly is a pretty quick step. W2MWP is better at keeping formatting and interpreting all characters. So, if you like the way your document looks and you want to keep it that way, use the W2MWP macro. The big downside of course is that it doesn’t work on MACs (which I’m using right now, yay for VMware). Nevertheless, my conclusion is that the DOC2Wiki Converters are useful, but may not be the optimal solution depending on how much you’re willing to install and play around with. And if the document isn’t formatted like it should be, then manual wiki formatting might be the way to go.