ACECAD DIGITAL NOTEPAD
Acecad is the manufacturer of several models of digital notepads. Unfortunately, they do not provide software for Linux. Native files can only be read with the manufacturer programs. However, it is possible to access the files on the device and through third-party solutions overcome most of the limitations of conversion and edition. It is a little bit of dirty work but at least a decent product can be obtained.
A501 / A502 / DM692
This solution is thanks to ETES that comes out with a brilliant solution.
1) Plug the digital notepad into a USB port in the computer. Check the product manual to get the procedure. The digital notepad is recognized as a usb memory.
2) Use a file browser to access the device. There is one file per document page and those files have the extension DHW.
3) Copy the native files to a any location in your hard disk that have write and read privileges.
4) Download this converter from here and then extract it to the folder containing the files of the previous step.
5) Open the terminal and then go to the file containing the document pages.
6) To convert one file to PS choose option a), to PDF option b), and to PNG option c)
6a) To convert one file to PS, which stands for PostScript, type:
- perl dhw2ps.pl PAGE_001.DHW
- To convert several files to PS type:
- perl dhw2ps.pl PAGE_001.DHW PAGE_002.DHW (and so on)
- perl dhw2ps.pl *.DHW
- perl dhw2ps.pl --pdf *.DHW
6c) To convert to PNG: first convert to PS using the step 6a) and then follow the instructions here
7) Assembling a document. What there is now is a bunch of files waiting to be assembled into a single document.
- 7a) To merge PDFs:
Download PDFTK from the Ubuntu repositories. Go here to obtain full information of how to use this command-line program. For a quick merge of all pages use the following expression. Replace mynotes by a name of your choice, this is how the output file will be named.
- pdftk *.pdf cat output mynotes.pdf
8) Programs for edition.
- 8a) Options to edit PS
- - flpsed
- - PDFedit