News

• 23/12/2008 - Work is starting on an abstraction layer for 3D effects (cube, fading, cover flow) to be done in C++ and OpenGL (join the  mailing list to contribute).
• 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 ;).

This is alpha software (and right now it's a quick hack too), but once you manage to get it working it's fairly stable and usable.

If you want to hack on the code feel free to contact me at <mirko.maischberger@…> either via mail or via jabber.

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 that will be added on svn and in the next 0.0.3 release.
• PDF Cube is included in Fedora 8 (Everything section).
• Seems like PDF Cube found its way into Ubuntu Gutsy (Universe)  Package Information.

Compatibility

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

Contact information

Feel free to write to <mirko.maischberger@…>

I'm a  senior software engineer and  OR PhD student. Please also note that this is a hobby/fun project to experiment with OpenGL and born for my personal use.  Here is a more serious project of mine.

Reviews

•  Chris Tyler's review.
•  www.OpenGL.org
•  Linux Weekly News
•  FSF Free Software Directory
•  Fedora Weekly News
•  HandyFLOSS wanted a Wikipedia article for PDF Cube but the page was deleted. Not really encyclopedic indeed (but actually  Evince and many others are :)

Word of Mouth

If you like this project please support by:

• Sending code and ideas
• Blogging it
•  Voting it on Freshmeat
•  Voting it on GnomeFiles
•  Spreading it on Ohloh

Counting the votes on freshmeat and gnomefiles and the users on ohloh, I can only imagine how rich I could get if I asked for money ;)

Future Plans

• Read transitions effects from PDF file.
• Jeferson J. Arenzon suggested adding a layer to draw with the mouse, useful during presentations.
• Joachim Breitner suggested to make PDF links active and pointed me to  this opengl page.

Mailing list

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

Are you a skilled OpenGL developer? Do you simply want to discuss how PDF cube should evolve? Do you just want to ask some questions regarding PDF Cube usage?

Join the mailing list:  http://lists.100allora.it/mailman/listinfo/pdfcube-dev and start asking (you need to subscribe to write to the list)!

There is also a new FrequentlyAskedQuestions page.

Icon

PDFCube needs an icon, if you are skilled in SVG graphics please send your icon proposal to <mirko.maischberger@…>

Badges