Post Processor Workbench

ppwb is a set of tools used in post-processing, the final stage of ebook production.

The workbench is a web front-end written in PHP that performs a variety of post-processing activities by calling out to external programs. It consists of a user-visible page (index.php) with links to programs for text analysis (see pptext.php), HTML analysis (see pphtml.php), "smart quote" processing (see ppsmq.php) and a file compare tool (see ppcomp.php).

The following two external tools need to be installed in directories under bin/:

• pptext in bin/pptext/
• pphtml in bin/pphtml/
• ppcomp in bin/ppcomp/

It's recommended that you clone those repos into bin/ directly:

cd bin
git clone https://github.com/DistributedProofreaders/pptext.git
git clone https://github.com/DistributedProofreaders/pphtml.git
git clone https://github.com/DistributedProofreaders/ppcomp.git

See the individual tools' README.md for their prerequisites.

For ppcomp to work, dwdiff needs to be installed as well.

Python environment

The external python programs require various python libraries to be installed in order to work. Consult with each of the tools' requirements.txt files for more details. These can be installed in the system's python3 installation (not recommended) or in a virtualenv dedicated for ppwb (preferred).

If using a virtualenv, you need to update $python_runner in config.php to call it like this:

$python_runner = "env VIRTUAL_ENV=/path/to/venv PATH=/path/to/venv/bin/python3";

Ensure that the web server can access the virtualenv. virtualenvs created in ~/.local may need to have the permissions updated (o+x) to allow the web server sufficient permissions.

Using Docker for development / testing

For convenience, you can run ppwb, ppcomp, pphtml, and pptext in a container. The included Docker Compose configuration will run a PPWB instance on localhost, using the code on your computer (outside the container) mounted into the container.

See the above instructions about installing ppcomp, pptext, pphtml under the "bin" directory. Depending what you're working on, you can clone the repository URLs above, or substitute your own forked URLs.

Once they're in place, build the image:

docker compose build

And then bring up the service:

# add -d if you prefer to run in the background
docker compose up

Visit http://localhost:8080 in your browser. (The port can be changed by editing docker-compose.yml, if necessary.)

When changes take effect

To change pptext Go code, you'll need to restart services. (The startup script rebuilds pptext.)

docker compose restart

If you make changes to Dockerfile or docker-entrypoint.sh, rebuild the image and restart.

To change the port of the web server, update docker-compose.yml and restart.

All other changes should take effect as soon as you save the file.