PDG files

[K. M. Lawson]

Hello everyone,

A lot of historical documents I have found available in China come in
a "PDG" format (.pdg). There are, for example, huge collections of
wenshi ziliao (For example, I believe I have almost a full collection
for Shandong in .pdg and there are companies which sell DVDs of other
provinces) available in the format.

I would love to be able to view these files on the Mac.

Currently, some of the collections I have come across come with
annoying old piece of software known as "Boox Viewer" for Windows and
something known as SSReader for Windows which comes with some nice
extra features such as built-in OCR.

Is there any way to view these pdg documents on the Mac? Is there an
equivalent for SSReader for the Mac?

If not, and as this is a mac list, feel free to ignore this last
question: Is there any way to get SSReader installed on an English
language copy of Windows XP (which I run in Parallels) such that
window headers and menu items don't come up either as gibberish or
question marks? Chinese seems to display normally in other contexts,
but a lot of Chinese software, when installed seems to have this
problem and I feel like I'm back in the pre-Unicode days...

Respectfully,

Konrad
muninn.net
froginawell.net

[Andrew Main]

K. M. Lawson wrote:

> A lot of historical documents I have found available in China come

> in a "PDG" format (.pdg). Currently, some of the collections I have
> come across come with something known as SSReader for Windows which

> comes with some nice extra features such as built-in OCR. Is there
> any way to view these pdg documents on the Mac? Is there an
> equivalent for SSReader for the Mac?

I know very little about this (don't run Windows myself), but out of
curiosity I searched a few file extension info sites and found this:
<http://www.file-extensions.org/pdg-file-extension-ssreader-document-file
>

which looks like the kind of document you're working with. It appears
there's a utility for Windows
<http://www.programurl.com/total-pdf-converter.htm>

that will convert these files to PDF, which then should be viewable on
the Mac? It's shareware ($50), so it looks like you can download it
and try it out.

Andrew Main

[Eric Rasmussen]

I think it is a proprietary format of 超星 ("Super Star"), the company
that makes SSReader. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have
electronic-text capabilities. It's strictly an image format designed
for handling books. That's why the enhanced edition [增强版本] of SSReader
includes OCR...

With any luck, the converter that Andrew found preserves the PDG's
organization of the book along with the component images... If not, I
think you're better off navigating the texts in SSReader.

On getting SSReader to run properly, have you checked Control Panel >
Regional and Language Options > Advanced > Language for Non-Unicode
Programs? I guess I'd set it to "Chinese (PRC)" in this case.

Eric

[K. M. Lawson]

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I will try your suggestion
Eric for the non-Unicode programs. It sucks that this can only be done
system wide since I would like to be able to run both Chinese non-
Unicode programs like SSReader and Korean non-Unicode programs like
the National Library's special document reader. However, that seems
to be the solution on the Windows side of things.

Andrew, great idea on finding a way to convert to PDF, that might be
the best long term solution if I want to have all these documents
conveniently available on my mac. I will I will check out the software
and see if I can get it running.

Thanks again for the quick replies and your help on both the mac and
windows side! This list is, as always, a wonderful resource.

Best,

Konrad
Jinan, Shandong

[Lei Feng]

Dear Konrad

I am running into the same problem out in Qinghai. Wondering if
either of the above solutions helped or if you had found another
solution. It seems like converting the files to .pdf would be the
most useful. Presumably they could then be opened on a mac.　Did you
purchase that conversion program by any chance? If you did, did it
work?

Thanks for any help you or others can provide.

Benno

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Actually, the program is supposed to be able to convert PDGs into
other image formats, not into PDFs - "Can be used to convert PDG to
the following image formats: BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, WMF, EMF and
EPS - Converts a batch of files". It is primarily a utility for
converting _from_ PDFs, not _into_ PDFs.

I will certainly try it out - like Konrad, I have tons of stuff in
this icky format.

Jens

[TenThousandThings]

Konrad, Jens, Benno,

UGH! As you may have already determined the hard way, "PDG" is a typo
(error) there, and the association on the file-extensions.org page
Andrew found was generated automatically based on the typo. If you go
to the Softplicity site, you'll see the same sentence with "PDF"
instead of "PDG" under the "Key Features" of Total PDF Converter.

So forget it -- back to square one.

Eric

On Nov 18, 2:36 am, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oest...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[TenThousandThings]

On Nov 18, 7:21 am, TenThousandThings <hello.ras...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you go to the Softplicity site, you'll see the same sentence with "PDF"

> instead of "PDG" under the "Key Features" ...

http://www.coolutils.com/TotalPDFConverter

["Softplicity Research" appears to be the parent company, or its old
name.]

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Shucks!

See, however, <http://www.comicer.com/stronghorse/water/software/pdg2pdf.htm#Pdg2Pic
>,

<http://chenjinghua.net/sci/pdg-transform-pdf-32.html>,

and other hits on Google for "PDG 转换".

Anyone dare try out these downloads?

Jens

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Pdg2Pic works fine. Install SSReader (超星浏览器) first and set non-Unicode
encoding to Chinese (PRC). Converts by default to TIFF format.

Jens

On Nov 18, 5:26 pm, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oest...@gmail.com>

[K. M. Lawson]

Hello everyone,

I'm just returning to see there have been more entries on this thread.

Yes, I did quickly surmise that the mention of PDG was just a typo. I
was however, able to get SSReader working fine on Windows through
parallels with the help described above. It is nice since it provides
OCR of selected areas of the PDG images so I think I'll continue to
use that for now.

Jens, the pdg2pic looks interesting. However, the website it
eventually points to for download http://stronghorse.yeah.net/ seems
to be unreachable for me here in Jinan for some reason.

Ultimately however, a converter like that will still have limited uses
since I'm dealing with thousands of images and need to be able to skim
through them quickly looking for materials I'm interested in.
Converting them first would be very time consuming (they come several
hundred pages zipped together in "zipped books" of which there are
several hundred just for Shandong documents) just so I can view them
again on the mac would actually make it easier to just view them
directly through Parallels. I guess I was hoping for too much when I
was looking for an app which can view them directly on the mac without
a windows-based conversion.

What the existence of the software shows, however, is that the
algorithm for the conversion is out there. For programmers, it would
be a matter of getting that conversion algorithm into a Mac-based
client, which could then be made into a viewer sold as shareware or
commercial software. For students of history like me that come across
so many of these documents, I would gladly pay, say, $20 for such a
piece of mac commercial software, and it sounds like I'm not the only
one to find something like that useful. Of course, the target market
of mac users wanting to view PDG might be too small to make such a
project worth it the programmers time.

Best,

Konrad

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Perhaps one could interest Thorsten Lemke <http://www.lemkesoft.com/>
in adding this format to GraphicConverter?

Jens

[K. M. Lawson]

Hello everyone,

Several years has passed since I posted in 2008 about my trouble with getting PDG formatted files, in which I have gigabytes of Chinese historical documents, into a format that does not require me to boot into Windows and use the SSReader software on.

I gave it another search this evening and came across this wonderful solution:

http://hi.baidu.com/mooncold/blog/item/8375d3888478f49ca4c2721b.html

I just tried this with SSReader 4.01 on Windows 7 (in Parallels on my OS X Lion desktop) and it worked wonderfully. In case the page goes down the solution is simply:

1) Create a printer, any printer on Windows. You don't need the actual printer

2) Open the files you want to print in SSReader, and select 打印 from the 图书 menu, and select the page you want to print to in 打印页数 (it will print from the currently shown page by default).

3) Press confirm, and then choose your printer, put a check mark next to "print to file" and print

4) Type a full length path to where you want the postscript file to be saved

5) Use Acrobat distiller or something else like it to convert your postscript file (save it for .ps for easy recognition by these applications) into a PDF

Wonderful!

After "print" converting a few of my documents to the tune of a few hundred pages, I got an error message that I had reached my "monthly limit" for printing. Fortunately, the programmers at SSReader were lazy and apparently just check your Windows date for this, so I merely moved the clock forward a month and started printing again.

I will now slowly rid myself of one of the last things I need to use Windows for.

I hope this finds the group well.

Best,

Konrad M. Lawson

http://muninn.net/

[Joe Wicentowski]

Cunning and devious, Konrad! Well done.

And this has to be a record of some kind, even if only on this list -
a thread closed after three and a half years.

Cheers,
Joe

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Thanks a lot, Konrad! 

Do you figure you will not receive new PDGs any more? I mean: are they getting more scarse?

Cheers,

Jens

PS: Don't fool around with the system clock on a non-virtual machine!

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