The default document viewer in Ubuntu, eVince, is a nice application with fast loading times. It’s pdf rendering is pretty good too, and supports Full Screen as well as automatic scrolling. But eVince is not all that steady with all types of pdf documents. For the documents involving high resolution graphics, Images, forms etc, eVince tends to become sluggish and some times taking ages to load the document. For documents like these, we need to use an alternate pdf reader, and that’s where FoxitReader comes to play.
FoxitReader is a famous pdf viewer, most popular with Windows users. But it also has a linux native version (Not a ported version using Wine or something else), which is as fast as it’s windows version and contains all the basic features. The download page has links to .bz2, .deb and .rpm packages.
Go to
here, and click on the “More Download” link in the Learn more column of the linux download table, and you can see the links for downloading the packages.
Ashok TT - Reviews, TT - Tools, TechTalk evince, foxit, pdf, Ubuntu
The
HTML Validator extension for Firefox has been an essential tool in my arsenal of web development tools. The extension has both the W3C algorithms (HTML Tidy and the SGML Parser) implemented, and it works locally (offline) for validating web pages. It eliminates the cumbersome uploading to W3C Validator service and shows instant results of the tests, pretty fast too (The largest page loaded took less than 1/100th second).
The HTML Validator has a nice debug window which not only shows the errors & warnings, but also shows tips on how to solve the errors, including small bits of demonstration code. It provides a wholesome learning experience about HTML standards.
The HTML Validator works flawlessly on Windows based systems, but on Linux, it faces a bit of trouble especially on Ubuntu. This is due to incompatibility of the LIBC++ version used to compile the extension and the one available on our system. The following steps will make the HTML Validator work on Ubuntu systems:
1. sudo apt-get install libxul-dev
2. sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
3. sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev
4. At the end of /etc/profile, add the following line:
“export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH/usr/lib/xulrunner/”
Then restart Firefox. If the status bar icon still doesn’t turnup, restart your X session and you’ll have the validator ready.
Ashok TT - How To, TT - Linux, TT - Tools, TechTalk HTML Validation, Jaunty, Ubuntu, Web Developer
Cleartrip.com, One of the leading online travel agents in India, has introduced an web application to check seats availability for trains operated under Indian Railways. Cleartrip Train Calendar provides an indication of availability for a range of dates across trains, so you can find the best date and train to travel. Cleartrip Train Calendar is a product of Cleartrip Research and is still in an early stage of development. The website says it may behave unexpectedly at times, but during my experimentation with the tool, it performed fairly well without any glitches.
The UI is as pleasant as an early morning at sunrise. Not only does it show the list of trains and availability, clicking on the train name pops up the train route, the stations that’ll be covered and the expected timings. It even provides a Map view using Google Maps. The whole UI is Ajax powered, and is extremely fast. This tool is definitely much better than what’s been provided at IRCTC website, the official website for Indian railway reservation. This is a wonderful app, Kudos to you guys @ Cleartrip.com.
Link to the Calendar
Ashok TT - Reviews, TT - Tools India, Railways, Travel, TT - Tools, Websites