News

• 13/12/2011 - Emil Kjer successfully built and installed  pdfcube-0.0.4-beta on MacOS X (MacOsDetails)
• 12/12/2011 -  pdfcube-0.0.4-beta released
• 12/12/2011 - Andreas Moog reported successfully running pdfcube-trunk on  Ubuntu Precise Pangolin
• 05/11/2011 - Compatibility issue with poppler 0.18 should be fixed in trunk. (please note that the new version reads transitions from the pdf file, so when a box transition is detected the cube effect is applied).
• 08/01/2009 - Ooops, we did  it again... :)
• 25/12/2008 - 365  downloads in the last 4 days.
• 22/12/2008 - PDFCube PDFCube 0.0.3 released, download it  here.
• 17/12/2008 - PDFCube source code has been downloaded 175 times in the last 10 days (and 3105 times in the last year and 5925 times since the first release).
• 12/12/2008 - New PDFCube 0.0.3 beta available. This was a joint work with Karol Sokolowsky.
• 02/01/2007 - PDFCube made it on  Linux Weekly News
• 19/12/2006 - Version 0.0.2 released.

PDFCube

PDF Cube uses Poppler and OpenGL APIs to add 3D spinning cube page transitions to PDF documents.

PDF Cube is a tiny (<100KiB) program to render PDF presentations with special 3D effects (a rotating cube transition and 5 predefined zoom animations). It adds eye-candy to your PDF presentations, even Latex, Beamer and Prosper ones.

Rotating 3D cube transition is of great effect when put on a big projection screen, so be moderate! One or two cube transitions done when changing argument can help understanding that you are switching to a new part of the presentation. On the other hand using cube transition on every page can give seasickness to your audience ;).

The main focus of PDFCube is on quality of the animation (given some supported DRI hardware), speed and reliability.

Downloading

You can  download any pdfcube version.

The latest stable version of PDFCube is 0.0.3

• Thanks to Alexander Wirt, pdfcube is now in main of  Debian unstable. You can simply apt-get it! Great Alex, Debian is my choice, also. Alex also provided a nice manpage for 0.0.2 that was modified and added to the 0.0.3 release.
• PDF Cube is included in Fedora 8 and following (Everything section).
• Seems like PDF Cube found its way into Ubuntu Gutsy (Universe).  Package Information. It's also in Hardy and Intrepid.
•  ArchLinux is the first distro to package version 0.0.3.

Plans for version 0.0.4 (now in trunk)

• Read Transitions from PDF: Luckily poppler-glib binding has added PDF transition information reading to its API. I should map PDF transitions to 3d transitions of my own. PDF transitions are a finite set of named transitions (blinds, fade, etc...) no cube transition mentioned. This will be useful expecially when we'll have more transition effects available. (This code is already in /trunk)
• Ask for a pdf file to open on startup
• Poppler 0.18 support

Future Plans

I'm busy starting a  new company that develops optimization software using operations research. Future plans will likely proceed very slowly. If someone wants to pick-up pdfcube development please drop me a line.

Active PDF links

PDF Links can be read in page coordinates via the Glib interface of poppler. Thanks to Pigment coordinate system it should be easy to activate this links. Links are of different types, to pages, to element in a page, to external documents, to movies. Not all links make sense inside PDFCube.

New Transition types

In the 0.1.0 development branch (available on svn as clutter-experiments) I'm experimenting new transitions. They are made easy thanks to the clutter library. The plan is to add fade, cover-flow, and some type of blinds.

Cover flow work is on the go, here is a screenshot of upcoming 0.1.0:

Compatibility

See PdfCubeCompatibility to know which hardware pdfcube runs on and success stories.

Reviews

• Like many other Free Softwares, PDFCube is included in the  Free Software Directory, a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
•  Chris Tyler's review.
•  www.OpenGL.org
•  Linux Weekly News in 2006  and a full review in 2008
•  Fedora Weekly News

A letter to Santa

Dear Santa, I've been a very good guy this year, please bring me some docs for poppler and clutter. Please bring some C++ developer willing to help, I feel very lonely coding alone. I'd like to rewrite some quality code from scratch using poppler, cairo and clutter and get rid of the hack pdfcube is right now.

Cheers, Mirko.

Contact information

(We have no) Mailing list

PDF Cube is an open source, spare-time, money-less project and needs your help!

Are you a skilled C/C++ developer? Do you know how to program in C++ using clutter? Do you simply want to discuss how PDF cube should evolve? Do you want to ask some questions regarding PDF Cube usage?

Feel free to write to mirko.maischberger (at) gmail (dot) com

Please read the FrequentlyAskedQuestions before posting or sending comments and bug reports.