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.
•  ArchLinux is the first distro to package version 0.0.3.

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