Dash Of Pepper Blog

Major news of the day: our applications have moved to new domain - Dash-of-Pepper.com. We have a nicely designed interface now and a brand new web application to announce: Starscape. With Starscape it is now possible to collect starred entries from Google Reader into well-formatted PDF.

Some new features have been added to WikiType (formerly known as WikiBooks2PDF or MediaWiki2PDF):

• You can choose chapters from the book you want to be formatted, so there’s no need to print the whole book just to get one chapter from it
• Rendered books are accompanied by information about the authors and the license
• ‘Print versions’ are skipped by default

Major news of the day: WikiBooks2PDF now formats PDF from Wikipedia articles, thus we’re about to rename the service to MediaWiki2PDF. Service pages have been redirected to blogpaper.com/mediawiki2pdf and blogpaper.com/minimediawiki2pdf.

New features:

MediaWiki2PDF

• We’ve changed the list of sample books by adding high-quality ones from WikiBooks.org and adding a category of small and fast formatting books. The look and feel of the list has also changed to make it easier to use
• We’ve added a number of preformatted books to view or download A4/Letter or E-Book sized PDFs generated by MediaWiki2PDF without formatting them by oneself
• Improved Unicode support
• Fixed error because of invalid attributes in URLs and images

BlogPaper

• Improved Unicode support
• Fixed the ‘User must be specified’ error, which somitemes occured when logging in

HTML2PDF

• The application now generates linearized PDFs

Possible problems:

MediaWiki2PDF

• The service may sometimes not format some wikibooks, “Ubuntu” for instance

BlogPaper

• We’ve found a bug with time and date not matching the needed format
• Some none-English feeds from GoogleReader cannot be formatted
• Service has got problems with formatting e-book sized PDFs

WikiBooks2PDF:

• Internal and external links’ behaviour in PDF is fixed

BlogPaper:

• Feeds are sorted by folders and by date in the output PDF

DoTeX:

• Application now supports Hebrew; see DoTeX page for example PDF
• Changes to Einstein Field Formulas example, see for yourself at DoTeX page
• Improved document layout for A4 and A5 paper sizes.
• New paper formats added: now you may generate books, articles and reports to read them on your book-reader

BlogPaper:

• Different text areas for accessing Bloglines and Google Reader shared feeds
• Improved the choice of feed-aggregator
• The link to download the latest formatted PDF is fixed
• The ‘Remember Password’ checkbox works correctly in IE
• Improved feedback sending option
• Automated refill of the form is added and works correctly

WikiBooks2PDF:

• Chapter and subchapter trees are correctly shown in document bookmarks

MiniBlogPaper:

• Improved the choice of feed-aggregator
• Passwords are safely stored on our server, so that users would not have to enter it each time they want to get a PDF

In addition, alerts and messages have become humanized and clear to understand, and the feedback sending option has been improved for all our applications.

WikiBooks2PDF:

• Improved error messages
• Output PDF is now linearized
• If the query to WikiBooks server was a failure and WikiBooks2PDF received an empty content as a result, than the query is repeated for several times before sending an error report
• The bug with some images not getting to output PDF is now fixed

BlogPaper:

• Improved error messages

We’re glad to announce a new online application - HTML2PDF. This is the tool for converting HTML documents to nicely-designed PDFs. No registration or private data needed. Everyone is free to use the service.

Users may either upload a document from a hard drive, or provide a URL. HTML2PDF will look through the document to verify whether it contains any mismatched HTML tags, make corrections if needed and pass it to DiType Formatting Engine to get a PDF. Users may also choose the size of the output document to suite their needs: either A4/Letter-sized which is suitable for reading from the PC display and printing, or E-Book sized, suitable for various portable devices such as Sony E-Book Reader.

And there’s a news concerning all of our web applications, too: users may now send feedback straight from applications’ web pages without even providing e-mail address or name. Every opinion is important to us.

BlogPaper:

• The modified layout of A4-sized documents
• The new ‘Remember me’ checkbox is added and is working properly
• If the query to Bloglines server was a failure, it’s repeated thrice before sending an error report
• The ‘Unauthorized error’ doesn’t get caught in an endless loop anymore

MiniBlogPaper:

• Fixed the choice of feed-aggregator

WikiBooks2PDF:

• Supports books in Hebrew language
• Now supports non-ASCII characters in URLs
• Some WikiBooks are cleared from unnecessary html content (e.g. table of contents for HTML version of the book)
• Fixed the bug with links (which redirect to some other) that sometimes occur in books
• Titles of examples on the WikiBooks2PDF main page are now clickable, so one may easily find the book on WikiBooks before getting a PDF version
• In case if formatting fails, the web-page is refreshed, so user may try to generate a book once again

DoTeX:

• Now one may format a document of A4 or A5 paper sizes

BlogPaper:

• Feed titles and XML now get to the log, which helps developers to reproduce the error when needed
• Output PDF has got a correct hierarchic bookmark-tree
• If formatting fails, the service automatically sends an error message to our server
• Service tests whether the answer from Bloglines is empty and skips formatting, if so
• BlogPaper now generates and formats feeds from Google Reader accounts

WikiBooks2PDF:

• New stamp in the footer of the output document with credits to RenderX DiType formatting engine
• Service generates correct hierachic bookmark-trees for output documents
• Formatting of some HTML elements is improved: code blocks and titles do not break to continue on next page any more, numbers appear in ordered lists

MiniWikiBooks2PDF:

• ‘Unresolved Internal Error’ bug is revealed and fixed

WikiBooks2PDF:

• Service checks whether the URL provided by a user exists and if it leads to a wikibook, and not somewhere else.
• The error occurs no more when entering a URL of book subchapter in spite of a URL of the book itself

BlogPaper:

• Title hierarchy is fixed and functions correctly
• Service checks the username provided for accessing shared feeds and bypasses the incorrect ones
• The ‘Unicode Decode Error’ skipping is now improved
• In case if some feeds don’t have a title then it’s set to ‘Untitled’ by default
• The button ‘Check All’ works correctly and is substituted by ‘Uncheck All’ when user checks all of his feeds
• Service works in Internet Explorer (6+)
• The bug with automated refill of the form is fixed
• Progress bar now functions correctly
• Information on number of unread items in feeds and of username and date gets to output PDF

In case if you didn’t know yet: you can access to light versions of both services with minimal interface and no JavaScript at all - MiniBlogPaper and MiniWikiBooks2PDF, suitable for portable devices. Below is the list of what was new in these.

MiniWikiBooks2PDF:

• Correct book title is seen in the document
• User may now choose which kind of document he wants to get: E-Book-sized or A4/Letter

MiniBlogPaper:

• If formatting fails, then the error log appears on the service page
• When the user has got no unread feeds, he doesn’t see the ‘Get PDF’ button
• User may now choose which kind of document he wants to get: E-Book-sized or A4/Letter
• The ‘Get PDF & Mark Items As Read’ button now exists and works correctly

WikiBooks To PDF:

• the full log is seen when formatting a document
• chapter titles in PDF are now shown differently
• a bookmark-tree is added to the output document
• the bug with incorrect button is now fixed (action is the same both when clicking the button with a mouse and when hitting the “Enter” key on your keyboard)

BlogPaper:

• the bug with incorrect action when checking all of the shared feeds is now fixed
• images are correctly scaled in the output PDF
• the correct XHTML validating is applied to feeds
• new title hierarchy applied to e-book-sized documents
• article date and author information in PDF is now shown differently
• empty feeds are filtered and do not ge to feeds list or PDF
• the ‘Unicode Decode Error’ bug is being detected and written into session log
• feeds are filtered not by status, but by presence of articles in them
• the bug with download button is now fixed for IE, FireFox and Safari users
• the Hebrew-languaged feeds are now supported