Coversheets

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Overview

The purpose of the Coversheets is to add a front and/or back covering page to a PDF document uploaded to an EPrint.

Coversheets work by using a user-defined Apache OpenOffice coversheet template uploaded to your EPrints repository. This template is then populated with the predefined attributes for the particular EPrint, before being attached to the front (or if specified, back) of any PDF documents uploaded for that EPrint. To do this a number of dependencies need to be installed:

  • Ghostscript or PDFtk: Either of these can be used to attach the coversheet to the rest of the PDF document.
  • Apache OpenOffice: This is used to open up the coversheet template, so that a coversheet for a particular EPrint can be created.
  • Oracle (Sun) Java: This is required to run the script to interact with OpenOffice and replace the templates tags with the appropriate EPrint attrubutes (title, authors, etc.).
  • Perl Modules: Needed for EPrints to interact with OpenOffice.

The instructions below provide guidance on testing and using the Coversheets Bazaar package on an EPrints 3.3 repository running on either Debian or RedHat based Linux distributions. These instructions are intended to be sufficiently generic to be interpreted for use when installing on other Linux distributions.


Installing Dependencies

GhostScript or PDFtk

The Coversheets Bazaar package requires either PDFtk of Ghostscript to attach the generated coversheet to the rest of the PDF document. For the more recent Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04, Debian 7 and RedHat/CentOS 7) Ghostscript is recommended as this is easier to install and more reliable, (e.g. it can reliably attach the coversheet without breaking the character encoding of the rest of the document, so you can still copy and paste out sections of the document). However, it may be less straightforward to get Ghostscript working for Coversheets on earlier distributions of Linux (e.g. pre Ubuntu 12.04 and RedHat/CentOS 6)

Ghostscript

Installing Ghostscript just requires a number of Linux packages. As root or with sudo run the appropriate following command:

  • Debian/Ubuntu:
 apt-get install ghostscript gsfonts gsfonts-other libgs9 libgs9-common
  • RedHat/Fedora/CentOS:
 yum install ghostscript ghostscript-devel ghostscript-fonts ghostscript-gtk

If you installed EPrints using the DEB or RPM package, it is likely many if not all of these packages will already be installed.

PDFtk

N.B. If you have already installed Ghostscript you do not need to install PDFtk as well.

As root or using sudo install gcj, g++ and make so you can compile pdftk.

  • Debian/Ubuntu
 apt-get install gcj-jdk g++ make
  • RedHat/Fedora/CentOS
 yum install gcc-java gcc-c++ make

Next, download and compile pdftk and deploy it in /usr/bin/.

  • Substitute LinuxDist for Debian on Debian/Ubuntu distributions and Redhat for RedHat/Fedora/CentOS distributions.
  • If you are using MakeFile.Debian check your version of gcj (gcj --version). You will then need to change VERSUFF in MakeFile.Debian to your version number but only the first two points of the version (e.g. 4.8.2 = 4.8).
 wget https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk-2.02-src.zip
 unzip pdftk-2.02-src.zip
 cd pdftk-2.02-dist/pdftk
 make -f Makefile.LinuxDist
 mv pdftk /usr/bin/


Oracle (Sun) Java

Oracle (Sun) Java is required to make use of the Coversheets package. By default this is not available in the standard package repositories of most Linux distributions. Follow the instructions below (as the root user or with sudo) to install Oracle (Sun) Java on your Linux distribution:

  • Debian/Ubuntu
 apt-get install python-software-properties
 add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
 apt-get update
 apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
  • When prompted agree to the license agreement.


 rpm -Uvh jdk-8u<version>-linux-<arch>.rpm


Perl Modules

Before installing the Perl modules make sure that make and gcc are installed as these are needed to build the OpenOffice Perl module. Run the appropriate command below as root or using sudo.

  • Debian/Ubuntu
 apt-get install make gcc
  • RedHat/Fedora/Centos
 yum install make gcc


As the root user install the following Perl modules using CPAN. Choose the default option for any prompted questions. 

 cpan ExtUtils::MakeMaker OpenOffice::OODoc PDF::API2 ADAMK/Archive-Zip-1.30.tar.gz

N.B.

  1. If you have not had to install any CPAN modules up to now ,you may be prompted to configure CPAN before installing these modules, if so always choose the default option provided.
  2. For Archive::Zip it is recommended to use the specific version 1.30 tarball (as specified above). CPAN will download this specific tarball as part of the installation, like it would for non-version specific modules. The reason for using this specific version is, that as of at least 28th April 2015 the latest CPAN module has a bug, which means it does not work as required for EPrints Coversheet purposes.


Apache OpenOffice

Download the tarballed package of OpenOffice 3.4.1 for your Linux distribution. Later and some earlier versions of OpenOffice should work just as well but 3.4.1 is tried and tested. Then extract your DEB or RPM packages and install as root (or with sudo) using dpkg or rpm as appropriate.

  • Debian/Ubuntu (64-bit):
 wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openofficeorg.mirror/stable/3.4.1/Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
 tar -xzvf Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
 mv en-US Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US
 dpkg -i Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/*.deb
  • RedHat/Fedora/CentOS (64-bit):
 wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openofficeorg.mirror/stable/3.4.1/Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
 tar -xzvf Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
 mv en-US Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-rpm_en-US
 rpm -Uvh Apache_OpenOffice_incubating_3.4.1_Linux_x86-64_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/*.rpm
  • N.B. For 32-bit versions remove '-64' from each of the lines above. You can check this by running the following command. If it returns something with '64' in it, it is 64-bit, if it does not, it is almost certainly 32-bit.
 uname -i


Enabling Coversheets

  • Login to the EPrints Archive as an administrator and go to the Admin page and under the System Tools tab, click on EPrints Bazaar button.
  • On the EPrints Bazaar page scroll and click on Enable next to the OpenOffice Toolkit package.
  • If the OpenOffice Toolkit package installs successfully, click on Enable next the Coversheets package.
  • If the Coversheets package successfully installed. Click on the Admin link in the top menu bar and under the System Tools tab click on Start OpenOffice.
  • When the page reloads next click on Start Indexer, if t is not already started.
  • Coversheets should now be installed and ready to go. You can test this by following the instructions under Deploying Coversheets.


Deploying Coversheets

  • Logged in as an adminstrator, click on Manage records then Coversheets. If you cannot find the the Manage records link you can go straight to the list of coversheet records at (substituting example.eprints.org for the hostname of you Eprints repository):
 http://example.eprints.org/cgi/users/home?screen=Listing&dataset=coversheet
  • Under the Coversheets page, click on Create New Coversheet. Fill in the Name and Description fields under Apply to checked the types you want to use a coversheet for.and set Priority to 1. If you wish to apply the coversheet to other types make sure they are checked as well.
  • Then, under Documents -> Front Page(s) upload the template coversheet front page, which you can adapt from the template at the URL below, before clicking Update button at the button of the page:
 http://files.eprints.org/1047/1/frontfile.odt
  • When the page reloads, click on the 'Exit button to go back to the Coversheet index page.
  • On the Coversheet index page, click on the icon with a green tick next to the coversheet you just added and then click on the Activate button on the page that loads.
  • Now follow the Testing Coversheets instructions to check that everything is configured and working as expected.


Testing Coversheets

  • Now add an EPrint as usually, ensuring it is of one of the types you selected under Apply to earlier.
  • Once you have deposited the EPrint and moved it to the repository. Click on the link to download the PDF. The PDF will load initially without a coversheet.
  • Click back to go back to the EPrints web interface and click on the Admin link.
  • On the Admin page click on the System Tools tab and then click on the Status button.
  • On the Status page click on the link on the Background Task Queue row. On the page that loads you should be able to see a ''Document:AddCoversheet task pending.
  • Once this task disappears from the list, go back to the PDF you loaded previously and do a hard refresh (e.g. Ctrl+F5) of the page.
  • If all has gone to plan your PDF document should now have a coversheet.


Designing your own Coversheet Template

  • If you have downloaded the example coversheet template from http://files.eprints.org/1047/1/frontfile.odt you can adapt it for your own EPrints repository by editing it in OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
    • Unfortunately, you cannot edit this in Microsoft Office as the document needs to be saved in .odt format.
  • Once you have opened the example coversheet template in OpenOffice or LibreOffice you can change the logos (images) used and the layout of the page as you choose fit.
  • Where a word is enclosed with ## either side (e.g. ##title##). Then this will be substituted with the appropriate EPrint attribute. By default the following tags can be put into a template coversheet to be replaced by the value for that EPrint attribute:
    • ##title##
    • ##type## (e.g. article, conference item, book section, etc.)
    • ##url## (to the EPrint on your EPrints repository)
    • ##date## (of when the EPrint was published)
    • ##citation## (of the EPrint as it would appear in an EPrints search result)
    • ##creators## (list of authors/editors of the EPrint)
    • ##doi_url##
  • Once you have finished your design, before saving make you do not have any white space at the end of the document, as this may cause a blank page to be added between your coversheet and main document.
  • After saving the file, you can upload to your EPrints repository as described in Deploying Coversheets.


Tips and Tricks

Adding Extra Coversheet Tags

Extra coversheet tags can be added by editing z_coversheet_tags.pl under the archives cfg/cfg.d/ directory.

Configuring 'Apply to' Options

Additional options (e.g. eprint_status, userid, series, publication, etc.) can be added to the $c->{license_application_fields} in z_coversheet.pl under the archives cfg/cfg.d/ directory. This will cause these options to appear in the form for editing a particular coversheet.


Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting whilst Designing your own Coversheet Template

Adding and formatting tags on your Coversheet Template

Make sure when you add tags (e.g. ##title##) to your coversheet template you type the whole string in one go. Try to avoid copying and pasting tags about, especially avoid copy parts of tags. Also be careful when changing the formatting (e.g. font size, colour, etc.) of a tag, making sure you change the format for the whole tag.

Not doing these things could lead to the underlying representing of the whole tag being broken up by styling elements, meaning that the coversheet package will no be able to find these tags to substitute them with the appropriate attribute from the EPrint. So when you come to look at the coversheet for your document, you will see the tag rather than the substituted attribute.

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