Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 May 3

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May 3

Why do you need Java for downloading Limewire now

Why do you need Java in order to download songs off of LimeWire now? It was never required before. What's up with that? Ericthebrainiac (talk) 01:30, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Read the articles you linked to. You can't run a program written in Java without the Java Runtime Environment. What was it written in before?--24.9.71.198 (talk) 01:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Maybe you had the JRE before, but it was an old version and LimeWire added some functionality that needs a more recent version. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 06:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

text image to plain text recognition

I have some PDF files from a scan in good condition and I need to copy the text from the document onto a form. Copy-Paste doesn't work, but is there some software or web app that can look at the text in the pdf (or any other text scan) and generate plain text? Like text recognition software?-- penubag  (talk) 09:39, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

If you have Microsoft Office then you can load your picture into Microsoft Office Document Imaging or whatever it's called. That converts scanned images to text, and it's surprisingly accurate. --Heron (talk) 10:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

For free solution, see tesseract (software), GOCR, ocrad. If you are on Windows, you should be able to run them under cygwin even if no other windows version is available. Also, there exist a program called pdftotext, but it won't help unless the "text" in your pdf is really in text and not image format. --88.194.216.207 (talk) 10:59, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

MS Office Imaging takes files only in TIF format, so you need some way to convert PDF to TIF. Moreover I doubt if its good for scanned hand-written text. The OP hasn't mentioned whether the PDFs have typed text or a hand-written one. Jay (talk) 17:02, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't use MS office so those free solutions worked fine. Thanks! -- penubag  (talk) 06:03, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Linux, adding user to group without having root access

I have an account at a web hosting service, and need a directory to be writable for the web server daemon (user www). My user account is myname, and I am a member of group myname. I would like to add user www to group myname, so that I can make a directory writable for user www without doing a chmod 666. Is that possible without having root access, and if so, how is it done? Thanks, --NorwegianBlue ^talk 11:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

It is possible, though very bad, that the /etc/group file is writable by you. If so, just add www to your group. However, you should view the contents of /etc/group first. It is possible that both you and www are in a common group already. You can assign the directory to that group and forget about changing groups for www. -- kainaw™ 20:30, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I checked it out now. Reassuringly, /etc/group was readonly for anyone but root. User myname was the only member of group myname, and member of no other groups. Moreover, user www was member of no groups other than its own. The entries looked like this:

     ...
     www::80:www
     ...
     ausername::7761:ausername
     anothername::7762:anothername
     myname::7763:myname
     ...

According to the manpage, the format is groupname:password:groupid:userlist. The double colons appear to indicate no group password. If I've understood this correctly, I need my group entry to be changed to

     myname::7763:myname,www

Correct? If so, I'll contact the site admins and request the change. Strange that no-one else among the many users of the site have had the need (or have been allowed) to add www to their group. Does it pose a security risk? I tried

     chgrp www dirname/

too, but the operation was not permitted. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 22:35, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

On a properly set-up system, it should be impossible to do what you ask without root privilage. Even if you found a loophole in local security - there is no guarantee that your hosting service wouldn't find it and fix it at some future time. You need to find another way. SteveBaker (talk) 03:16, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I understand. I can of course contact the site admin, and request the change. Is there a sequrity risk in adding www to group myname? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 10:00, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Any other user who has www privileges will be able to use those privileges on directories for your group. For a multiple-host service, it is usually better to give each user two accounts - a user account and a www account. Then, there's no blurring between privileges between unrelated users all running their scripts as www. -- kainaw™ 02:23, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I had a second look at /etc/group and /etc/passwd. There didn't appear to be any accounts that fit your description, www was member of no groups but its own. But I'll contact the site administrators, and hopefully they'll suggest a solution. Thanks. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 18:37, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Free handwriting font?

Does anyone know of a website like this one but free? Thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 11:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

You could use some font creation software. here is a tutorial. IT's a little bit more dificult, but you may be able to tweak the results better. And it'll save you the nine bucks that yourfonts.com or fontifier.com APL (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

That will, of course, entail buying the HighLogic software used in the tutorial... ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 16:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

There's a 30 day trial, but you could also use a free piece of software like FontForge, but I understand it's not quite as user friendly.

(Incidentally, didn't yourfonts.com used to be free? I've got a note to that effect in my bookmarks file. But it's definitely a pay service now.) APL (talk) 19:58, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

There's dafont, among others. - mako 05:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

That's nothing like it... I meant a website like this one. ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 06:48, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

(Oops, sorry. I just saw the heading and didn't follow through with reading.) I can only find paysites, so I guess FontForge looks like the best free alternative. - mako 04:47, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

PDF TO WORD

What kind of programs do I need to convert pdf files to word files (or txt files)?? I do know that Adobe Acrobat Pro is one of such programs, but 500 bucks for just a program seems too much of a price to pay. And since I'll be needing to convert pdf files frequently from now on (pdf to word AND word to pdf), free trial programs aren't exactly ideal for me. So does anyone know of any FREE, easy to use softwares that converts pdf files??? (or if possible, a link where i can download the full version of adobe acrobat pro for free?)Johnnyboi7 (talk) 14:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

OpenOffice probably can do it. For windows, you can get a few different command line pdf convertors with cygwin, like pdftotext, but I don't think any of them will convert to "word file" (whatever it is). --93.106.46.15 (talk) 14:49, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

By "word file" I think Johnnyboi means a native Microsoft Word document (a .doc file). No, OpenOffice won't do this; it doesn't even read PDFs correctly (not that it's intended to). It can create PDFs but not import them. Tonywalton ^Talk 14:57, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Are the PDFs scans, or digital outputs from a Word processing program? (That is, are they pages that were scanned in or were they just exported as PDFs.) If the former then you are really not going to likely be satisfied with automatic conversion — OCR for long documents is piss-poor and requires about as much editing time as it would take to just type it all in right the first time. If they are digital outputs, it is relatively easy to find things that will take all the text from the life (like pdftotext) and dump it into a big text file. It is not very elegant and sometimes has problems depending how exactly the PDF was created. As for converting PDFs to DOC files, there are a lot of non-free "converters" out there but they are not, in my experience, very accurate.

The basic problem here is that PDF is meant to be a write-once format — it is an output state meant for printing, not for document editing or distribution. Once something is in a PDF format it is NOT easy to edit it or to get it into any other type of file format. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:58, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I strongly suggest you work on your operating plan some more. Converting PDF to anything is terrible. It is a headache. It rarely works. You spend hours (if not days) correcting mistakes. What you need to do is have a bunch of word documents. Those are the masters. You edit them as needed. You make a PDF copy of the word documents as needed. So, you do not convert your word document to a PDF document and delete the word document. You keep the word document and two copies: one word and one PDF. Whatever your plan is - it should include the concept that PDF documents are read-only. You cannot edit them in any way. -- kainaw™ 02:17, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

There's a freeware program here. I used it recently and got reasonably good results. At least all the original text was preserved. Results vary wildly depending on the source of the PDF, and the program I linked to won't extract any text at all if the PDF was made from a scan. --Heron (talk) 19:10, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Watching an AVI file on a DVD player

I've got an avi file (700MB) that I can watch on my pc no problem using VLC media player or whatever. How can I put this in a format where I can watch it on a standard DVD player? I know I could run it through Final Cut Pro or something and convert it then burn it through DVD Studio Pro, but that seems very long winded and would take ages. So is there a quick way to do it? My DVD player says DiVX on it, so can I just burn it to a DVD? Thanks.Popcorn II (talk) 18:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I use ConvertXtoDVD - quick, painless and bug-free method of getting almost any video format onto DVD quickly Sandman30s (talk) 20:35, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks but I'm using a Mac and doesn't look like this supports Mac.Popcorn II (talk) 21:06, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

There's a good chance it will work without conversion. If you have a DVD-RW or CD-RW handy then you can experiment without wasting plastic. AVI files can use many video compression methods but "Divx" and variants (Xvid, Microsoft MPEG-4) are common. You can go to Tools/Codec Information in VLC to see the compression type. DIVX could also mean DIVX (Digital Video Express) if it's a very old player—in that case there's no chance it'll play the file. -- BenRG (talk) 00:32, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

If the DVD player says it plays DiVX files, then you don't need to do any re-encoding; just burn the file directly on the disc and the player will play it. When you pop it in, a list of the playable file(s) will pop up on the screen and you can start wherever you like. With all respect to Sandman, do not re-encode files unless you actually have to; you'll almost certainly lower the quality every time you convert something. Matt Deres (talk) 14:04, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

If you're going to be doing this a lot, I would recommend buying a DVD player with a USB port. That way you won't have to take the time to burn everything to DVD. Mine cost about £20. Mahahahaneapneap (talk) 17:04, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

google search

If foo yields a hit, you would expect foo -"blah blah blah" to also yield a hit. This search yields a hit, and this search does as well, as expected. However, this and this do not yield anything. Why? Thanks. --VectorField (talk) 18:43, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Google has a few strangenesses. One of them is dropping out most punctuation marks from your search criteria.(It will also no longer search for partial words, eg "winism" will no longer find "darwinism" as it used to). I get the same results as you; but if I just LOOK at the Advanced page, then click Search from there, is moves your exclusions up where they really belong, ahead of the site:parameter, as separate words, so it reads 'darwin -blah -blah -blah site:'etc.

Putting a phrase into quotes just places into the 'this exact wording' box, if you look in Advanced. But for exclusions, there is no 'exact wording' box. Anything you put into exclusions, with or without quotes, will be treated as separate words. So you are telling it to give you everything about Darwin, as long as it does not contain the words "it" and "was". Try to come up with rare words to use as criteria, especially for exclusions.KoolerStill (talk) 19:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Page Up/Down Capture

I have a program that works fine. When you press either the page up or page down buttons, it does its thing. I want it to work with one of those handheld presenter things that has a "forward" and "backward" button it. In PDF viewer and powerpoint, the device acts as a page up/page down keypress. So, I thought that since my program handled those key presses, all would be fine. However, it doesn't respond to the handheld presenter at all. I'm just looking for a starting point to figure out how to make my program respond to the presenter instead of only the keyboard. -- kainaw™ 22:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

What's the brand and model number of the presenter thing? Does it do a page-up and page-down while you are in Notepad or Word and you have a long document open? Tempshill (talk) 03:44, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

It is a Targus AMP03US. I cannot answer the question about notepad/word until I get to a Windows machine again. -- kainaw™ 13:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)