About kpdfsync

When reading PDF documents on Kindle, the major annoyance is that the it does not save the highlights and notes on the files themselves.

As the highlights and notes can only seen on a Kindle, reading the PDF file in any other device is like reading the file from the start. This also means that I cannot have backup of the file (with the annotations from Kindle) or share it with anyone.

This software tries to provide a solution. kpdfsync reads the ‘My Clippings.txt’ text file for the highlights and notes and then applies them in the correct place on a PDF file.

Currently it is under development, so all the features may not work or be present. There can also be serious bugs present, so I request you to keep backup of the files you give to kpdfsync (the clippings file and pdf files).

Here is the rough roadmap of the development.

Roadmap

• Parsing the Clippings.txt file
• Search for the highlighted text in a page of the PDF file.
• Annotate highlight and notes on the PDF file.
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing.
• Highlights to notes mapping. This is required, because the clippings text file does not provide information which can used to determine which notes are related to which highlight on a single page. Some cases where a page contains a single note and highlight, automatic pairs are created, however in cases where there are more than one note, these associations can be created manually by the user.
• GUI finalizing for the Alpha release.
• Debug loggings
• Alpha Release 1

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• Bug Fixes
• Feature: Fixing common PDF errors.
• Usage guide for the end user.
• Alpha Release 2

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• Bug Fixes: Some common PDF bugs are now fixed.
• UI change to make it more suitable for screens with lower resolution.
• Alpha Release 3

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• Bug Fixes: Some minor fixes in UI
• Feature: Added new parser for reading older Kindle Clippings format.
• UI change to select different parsers.
• Alpha Release 4

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• Fine tune the rough edges in the supporting library.
• Memory/Resource optimization.
• Finalizing and optimizing the Graphical User Interface.
• Beta Release

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Installation

Once you have downloaded the release binaries, and the minimum requirements are met, to start Kpdfsync, execute the kpdfsync file in Linux/Mac OS or kpdfsync.bat in Windows.

Minimum requirements

• JRE 1.8 Note: JRE headless will not work.
• Linux, Windows 7, Mac OS Sierra(*)
• Linux: poppler-utils(**)
• Windows: poppler-utils(**) is included with the release. (will work out of the box)

(*) PDF fixing feature does not work on Mac OS. (**) Required only for PDF fixing feature.

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Building from source

Minimum requirements

• Linux, Windows 7, Mac OS Sierra
• JDK 8
• CMake 3.10

Steps

Clone the repo or download the source. Then to build, run the following command at the top-level of the source directory.

This will build jar files in build/bin directory, then run build/bin/coderarjob.kpdfsync.jar.

$ cmake -Bbuild
$ cd build
$ cmake --build . run

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Troubleshooting

• (Windows) Error: api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing. Install (Update for Universal C Runtime)[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2999226]

Troubleshooting

(Windows) Error: api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing.

Install Update for Universal C Runtime

3rd-party License

• PDF Clown library is used to read and highlight on PDF files. PDF Clown library is covered under LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). More information and source code can be found here http://www.pdfclown.org

• Poppler is covered under GPL3 license.