Framework: DIY E-Book Creator

[mellow-yellow]

Hi Everyone,

I just spent the last 3-4 weeks creating an open source "framework" for what I (tentatively) called the DIY E-Book Creator (download: http://code.google.com/p/diy-ebook-creator/). It should be able to integrate into this LiveCD Project.

Tulon, Petr, Strider1551, Anonymous1/2, Misty, Rob, and many others have written such awesome software that it seems wise to attempt a framework (I'm not the first one) to plug them in together, allowing the average Joe to pick and choose how to create his e-books. My attempt uses the Django framework for creating websites (targeting those web developers amongst us) to create a "wizard" (building on Steve DeVore's approach), prompting the user through the process, with his answers being saved automatically to speed up future runs. Since Django uses python (Anonymous2, strider1551, others?), my hope is that the community, if interested, will help build it out.

This current version (0.0.1) is *buggy* (I'm far from the greatest programmer here) and incomplete (e.g. it currently just copies and renames the photos on your camera's cards). However, I'm hoping that the DIY group will find it useful, especially as an integration framework (e.g. notice file upload approach, which I'd like to use with Petr's command-line version of ScanTailor). As always, huge thanks go to Daniel, Rob, Misty, and Tulon!

Finally, I developed this on behalf of the Paper Upgrade Project (http://www.paperupgrade.org), a 501(c)(3) educational public charity which uses DIY Book Scanners to accelerate student learning. I'm using this software actively (and thus debugging it accordingly) to speed up the Paper Upgrade's workflow.

Thanks!

Sean Wingert (Mellow-Yellow)
---
P. S. To you developers, I'm a newbie to django, python, and Google Code (4 weeks actually; I'm more of a Drupal guy), so, to you, I apologize for the cruft (there is a *lot* of work to do yet). On the positive side, contributors can pretty much follow the free, online tutorials (http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/) to see how I built this and thereby improve it.

[Anonymous2]

Wow, this looks amazing! I never would've thought of using a web-based solution. That's pretty neat. I just ran the webserver and the layout seems quite intuitive, so good job!

Just a couple of questions:

• How are you planning on integrating Scan Tailor into this workflow? Are you just going to create a ST project file manually and launch ST with that project open?
• What about the final binding phase? Will you have a wrapper for djvubind and pdfbeads as well?

[mellow-yellow]

Sorry for the delay in responding. I have uploaded the git source: http://code.google.com/p/diy-ebook-creator/

Anonymous2
Thanks for the kudos.

How are you planning on integrating Scan Tailor into this workflow?

I'm still open to ideas, but my initial (maybe naive) thought is to simply use the command-line version of Scan Tailor to automate as much as possible (whatever that ends up meaning).

Are you just going to create a ST project file manually and launch ST with that project open?

Yes. Another idea is to provide a live "preview" window (like watching TV) of the page-by-page progress (I'm not sure how yet though).

What about the final binding phase? Will you have a wrapper for djvubind and pdfbeads as well?

Yes, I think that would be great. Maybe they are radio buttons at a final screen.

Again, I'm open to ideas on all of these things.

[n9yty]

If one wanted to take the source to work with on OSX, what do you do?

I have installed Django and put the source in my site-packages, but where is the frontend or launch point?

[update: seems to be something like:
cd /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/diy; python manage.py runserver 8080
but I get errors I will have to look into.]

[mellow-yellow]

Sorry for the delay. Yes, just do something like this:

$cd /path/to/site-packages/diy
$python manage.py runserver 80

As of 0.0.6, you will need the PIL module. On Mac and Linux, you'll likely get some errors, since I haven't spent any time testing on those platforms. Specifically, if you check the code in djos.py, you'll see a section asking for help to get the paths for ABBYY working on OS X and *nix. If you have some coding skills, please give it a shot! I can help a bit from here.

[n9yty]

Ahhh, I don't have ABBY. Well, I have a version that came with a SnapScan unit but it won't process images from other sources and it crashes on launch in my current version of Lion. Looking into that, but it likely won't help with this workflow. In all honesty, since I have a license for Win7 I probably will just test this out and maybe even run it under Windows.