Dear LyX-Users and Developers, I am writing regarding a project idea that I had. A couple of weeks ago, I was putting together an article about the different utilities available for working with PDF documents on Linux (http://blog.oak-tree.us/index.php/2010/05/26/pdf-linux). While doing so, I looked high and low for something that would make it easy to optimize a PDF for web distribution. Specifically, I wanted a tool to downsample images, convert between different color spaces, and streamline the PDF for web viewing.
I came up empty handed. PDF optimization seems to be the last big hurdle to having a complete set of GUI tools on Linux, and as I've become pretty sensitive to these sorts of holes and annoyances (referred to as "paper cuts" within the Ubuntu project) it really struck a nerve (writing a book that claims that open source tools are better for writing than proprietary ones opens the eyes to all kinds of shortcomings). As a result, I spent some of my free-time researching ways to implement this sort of tool. As it turns out, slapping together a functional (and useful) prototype probably wouldn't be too hard. The GUI and framework already exists in the form of PDF-Shufler (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfshuffler/), which is written in Python and relies on python-pdf. The image manipulation could be done using any one four or five image processing frameworks for Python. The only missing piece is some backend code that can integrate the two, and some GUI code to provide users with options. I am writing to see if there are any students, budding Python programmers, or others who might be interested in collaborating on this. I've already created a GUI layout and a pretty detailed spec that could serve as a starting point. Unfortunately, given work stuff, the outliner module for LyX and the book I'm writing, I can't take on responsibility for yet another project. From what I've put together so far, I estimate that it would take about 25 to 30 hours of programming time to implement. Such a program would plug a *really* big hole in the world of Linux based/writing and publishing and would be an enormous aid to many people, it would also be a great project for people who wish to learn more about document manipulation or image processing. (Requests for this type of tool repeatedely show up on users mailing list.) And as per the GPL, any patches would be sent upstream to the maintainer of PDF-Shuffler. Anyone who might interested? Cheers, Rob Oakes
