Ways You Can Help the PPR Project

Last revised 14 October 2003.

Over the years, PPR has become a large package. The result is that I am unable to make all the improvements I would like. Of course, it would be ideal if people were able to make major contributions to the code itself, but their are other smaller things that people could do which would help nearly as much.

That is why I have started this list. It attempts to list small to medium project that people could do and contribute to the project. As you will see, some of them require no programing skill to speak of.

If you would like to have a crack at any of these, please write to me at David.Chappell@trincoll.edu to make sure someone else isn't working on it already.

Documentation

• Find a way to convert the Perl .pod versions of the PPR man pages to Docbook.
• If you get the answer to a question, perhaps from the PPR mailing list, assemble them into a well-formed question and answer and contribute them to the PPR FAQ.
• Write a brief howto for something that isn't well explained in the PPR documentation. With your permission, such a howto segment could be posted on the PPR website or incorporated into future official documenation.

Internationalization

• Produce po (message translation) files for your language. So far the only one we have is French.
• Work on the po files for Russian. (I write Russian too slowly and too poorly to get this finished. If someone helps, all languages will benefit since I will be able to see what works and what doesn't in a translated version. (If you intend to do this, drop me a note so that we don't duplicate work.))

Small Programming Tasks

• Create additional input file filter scripts to convert additional input file types to PostScript. (Generally these scripts are very short and use commonly available programs such as NetPBM, Acroread, and Troff to produce PostScript.)
• Figure out if and how the PPR WWW interface scripts must be changed to work with mod_perl.
• Modify the PPR web server to cache compiled scripts as mod_perl does.
• Produce a Perl script to correct the defective PostScript output of your favorite (or least favorite) application.

Research

• Figure out how to concatenate MP3 files (This is done, Howard Best refers us to http://www.llbest.com/ConcatenatingMP3Files.htm.)

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