Introduction
============

PdfPeek is a Plone 4 add-on product that utilizes GNU Ghostscript to generate
image thumbnail previews of PDF files uploaded to ATFile based content
objects.

This product, when installed in a Plone 4.x site, will automatically generate 
preview and thumbnail images of each page of uploaded PDF files and store 
them annotated onto the content object containing the PDF file.

Image generation from the PDF file is processed asynchronously so that the user
does not have to wait for the images to be created in order to continue using
the site, as the processing of large PDF files can take many minutes to complete.

When a file object is initialized or edited, PdfPeek checks to see if a PDF file
was uploaded. If so, a ghostscript image conversion job is added to the pdfpeek
job queue. If the file uploaded is not of content type 'application/pdf', an
image removal job is added to the pdfpeek job queue. This job queue is processed
periodically by a cron job or a zope clock server process. The image conversion
jobs add the IPDF interface to the content object and store the resulting image
preview and thumbnail for each page of the PDF annotated on to the content
object itself. The image removal jobs remove the image annotations and the IPDF
interface from the content object.

If a job fails, it is removed from the processing queue and appended to a list
of failed jobs. If a job succeeds, it is removed from the processing queue and
appended to a list of successfully completed jobs.

PdfPeek ships with an example user interface that is turned on by default. This
UI displays the thumbnail images of each page of the PDF file when a user views
the content object in their browser. This example UI is not quite working yet,
and is meant to be just that, an example. I don't claim to be a javascript
master.

A custom traverser is available to make it easy to access the images and
previews directly, as well as to build custom views incorporating image
previews of file content.

PdfPeek ships with a configlet that allows the site administrator to adjust the
size of the generated preview and thumbnail images, as well as toggle the
example user interface and default event handlers on and off.

**Requires the GNU ghostscript gs binary to be available on the $PATH!**

*Tested on POSIX compliant systems such as LINUX and MacOS 10.6. Untested on* 
*Windows systems.*
*(Wouldn't be surprised if it works, as long as you can install gs.)*

*As of version 0.17, Plone 3.x is no longer officially supported.*

 * Code repository: https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.pdfpeek
 * Questions and comments to db@davidbrenneman.com
 * Report bugs to db@davidbrenneman.com