Introduction

This package integrates documentcloud's viewer and pdf processing into plone.

Example viewer: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/19864-goldman-sachs-internal-emails

Features

• very nice document viewer
• OCR
• Searchable on OCR text
• works with many different document types
• plone.app.async integration with task monitor
• lots of configuration options
• PDF Album view for display groups of PDFs

Works with

Besides displaying PDFs, it will also display:

• Word
• Excel
• Powerpoint
• HTML
• RTF

Install requirements

• Docsplit: http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/
• GraphicsMagick
• ghostscript (version 9.0 preferred)
• Poppler
• tesseract (optional)
• pdftk (optional)
• OpenOffice or LibreOffice (optional, for doc, excel, ppt, etc. types)
• md5 or md5sum command line tool

Async Integration

It it highly recommended to install and configure plone.app.async in combination with this package. Doing so will manage all pdf conversions processes asynchronously so the user isn't delayed so much when saving files.

Settings

The product can be configured via a control panel item Document Viewer Settings.

Some interesting configuration options:

Storage Type

If you want to be able to serve you files via amazon cloud, this will allow you to store the data in flat files that can be synced to another server.

Storage Location

Where are the server to store the files.

OCR

Use tesseract to scan the document for text. This process ca be slow so if your pdfs do not need to be OCR'd, you may disable.

Auto Select Layout

For pdf files added to the site, automatically select the document viewer display.

Auto Convert

When pdf files are added and modified, automatically convert.

Auto layout file types

Types that should automatically be converted to document viewer

Dexterity support

If you want to use it with your own Dexterity content type. You need to edit the fti in ZMI/portal_types/yourtype to add "documentviewer" in the available view methods and to set the primary field in the schema, for example:

<field name="myfile" marshal:primary="true"
       type="plone.namedfile.field.NamedBlobFile">

File storage integration

If you choose to use basic file storage instead of zodb blob storage, there are a few things you'll want to keep in mind.

1. Use nginx to then serve the file system files. This might require you install a local nginx just for serving file storage on the plone server. You can get creative with how your file storage is used though.
2. Since in plone's delete operation, it can be interrupted and the deletion of a file on the OS system system can not be done within a transaction, no files are ever deleted. However, there is an action you can put in a cron task to clean up your file storage directory. Just call the url http://zeoinstace/plone/@@dvcleanup-filestorage.

Upgrading from page turner

If you currently have page turner installed, this project will supercede it. Your page turner views will work but no future files added to the site will be converted to page turner.

To convert existing view, on every page turner enabled file, there will be a button Document Viewer Convert that you can click to manually convert page turner to document viewer.

To convert all existing views, go to portal_setup in the zmi, upgrades, select collective.documentviewer, click to show old upgrades and there should be an upgrade-all step to run.

Upgrading from pdfpal

If you want to upgrade from pdfpal, it is recommended that you simply uninstall pdf pal.

Document viewer will disable parts of pdfpal if installed with it otherwise. If you still want both installed, you'll need to upgrade to at least version 0.7b5 in order for it to play nice with document viewer.

Also, version 0.7b6 has the best uninstall support so if you're going to uninstall the product, first upgrade your egg to 0.7b6.

Installation on Cent OS/Red hat

Special instructions for centos have been contributed by Eric Tyrer. You can access them via the git hub repo file location.

Installation

If on a linux/ubuntu/debian machine you run into an error like:

/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/docsplit-0.7.2/lib/docsplit/image_extractor.rb:51:in `exists?': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
from /var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/docsplit-0.7.2/lib/docsplit/image_extractor.rb:51:in `ensure in convert'

This is because the ruby docsplit library is having an issue with the temp folder accesses, and removal of temp files. Just run the following command:

sudo chmod 1777 /tmp && sudo chmod 1777 /var/tmp

And retry the conversion of your document

TODO

• check why there are some error during async operations:

  • ConflictError: database conflict error (oid 0x4d10, class BTrees.IOBTree.IOBucket, serial this txn started with 0x0395f478bc2cb377 2012-04-21 03:36:44.103425, serial currently committed 0x0395f479b09de4cc 2012-04-21 03:37:41.394556)
  • ERROR ZODB.Connection Shouldn't load state for 0x319d when the connection is closed