News

• 06/01/2009 - New IRC channel #pdfcube on FreeNode?, help it grow!
• 25/12/2008 - 365  downloads in the last 4 days.
• 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). Another option can be to use pigment.
• 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.

Future Plans

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.

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 (not yet available on svn) I'm experimenting new transitions. They are made easy thanks to the pigment 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

•  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

A letter to Santa

Dear Santa, I've been a very good guy this year, please bring me some docs for poppler and pigment. 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 pigment and get rid of the hack pdfcube is right now.

Cheers, Mirko.

Contact information

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 want to ask some questions regarding PDF Cube usage?

Join the mailing list (low traffic, no spam):  http://lists.100allora.it/mailman/listinfo/pdfcube-dev and start asking. (you need to subscribe to write to the list)

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

Contact directly

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.

Icon

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

Badges

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