I decided to buy an ebook reader recently as there's a lot of manga I want to catch up on and after borrowing mallum's Sony Librie for a while, I've found that it's a great format for reading comics. Brilliant to de-stress while things are compiling. Anyway, Linux tools for such devices seem to be woefully lacking, so I figured it couldn't be that hard to write my own (for my own particular needs) - and thanks to FOSS, it really wasn't :)
Thanks to The GIMP's scripting engine, I have a script that can transform images into the required format; thanks to bash, I have a shell script that can get all the images to the script; and thanks to cairo, it was incredibly easy to write an app that turns a load of PNGs into a PDF. Source for all can be found here - handy if you have a Sony Reader/Librie or an Irex Iliad or something along those lines. Probably less useful for Kindle users..?
shivan says:
actually, you could have done all that with bash + imagemagick since convert handles pdf files.
and for webcomic lovers, there's bash + wget, it's awefully easy to download the strips, and then give them the same treatment.
Chris Lord says:
@shivan: I considered imagemagick, took one look at the docs and realised that it was quicker to relearn Scheme than it was to learn imagemagick's insane syntax. That and it's probably quicker to keep one instance of The GIMP open to do all the processing than it is to constantly reload imagemagick. Can imagemagick produce PDF files though? That's pretty neat all the same :)
shivan says:
yep it can produce pdf, and read from them, but I agree, syntax is insane. nevertheless, once you found it, you're done. and reading e-ink-ize.scm, I'm not sure which one is easier :-)
regarding performance, I have no idea which one is quicker though
LionsPhil says:
Wot, no mktemp?
Brian C says:
Sorry for being dense, but could you add a README file or something to explain installation and use? This sounds like something I might really find useful, but I'm not sure I understand what format the source files should be in, what exactly you do to them (step-by-step for dummies), and what format they get spit out as at the end of the process. Thanks for any info.
Brian
Any comments?
