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I am currently learning rails, day to day, and I get more attached. I would like to use Rails to build a Web app with similar functionality like Scribd or Docstoc.

What components/gems/plugins/libraries in Rails or Ruby could be used to create a web app with similar functionallity ?

The web app should be have the

  • Epub coversion to image(jpeg) as well as pdf
  • PDF conversion to image (jpeg) as well as epub
  • PDF to Epub

I would just like suggestions on the libraries or plugins, etc... to use to obtain the above functionalities using Rails, and what makes them special.

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Thanks Matthieu. Ended up just converting PDF's to images. And unzipping the Epubs. pdf.js looks promising as well github.com/mozilla/pdf.js – Skillachie May 12 '12 at 23:15

1 Answer

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Most document conversion systems would most likely be Unix libraries/software; you'll most likely want to establish a list of all the file-types that you want to handle and the way you want to handle them (just convert them to a JPEG, convert to a PDF to preserve the text, etc.). You will also need to offload the document processing to a queue of workers so that your web server does not get bogged down. A good overview of this sort of system was written by Jeremy McAnally about his tldr.it web page summarizing system.

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Thank you, have not been active with this profile – Skillachie Nov 26 '11 at 14:05

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