Docs | Attachment Converter

Attachment Converter is written in OCaml, which means that in order to build it, you need to install the opam package manager, which we recommend doing via your operating system's package manager. For example:

Arch Linux:

$ pacman -S opam

macOS:

$ brew install opam

WSL Debian:

$ apt install opam

Then, regardless of how you install opam, you need to initialize it in order to be able to use it.

$ opam init
$ eval $(opam env)

opam should then print some information to the console telling you about the steps it's taking to initialize.

That should be enough to get you going, but if you'd like more detailed information on how to install opam, please see the official installation instructions.

Attachment Converter relies on the Mercurial version control system to install some of its third-party library dependencies. For example:

Arch Linux:

$ pacman -S mercurial

macOS:

$ brew install mercurial

WSL Debian:

$ apt install mercurial

To install all third-party library dependencies for Attachment Converter to your ~/.opam directory (which is where opam put the OCaml compiler and other packages it's going to use when you ran opam init), please run the following make rule from the root directory of the GitHub project you cloned:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code/attachment-converter
$ make deps

This will make the Digital Library Development Center's very own opam repository available to you, then install all of Attachment Converter's third-party library dependencies. make deps should suffice for most purposes, but if you'd like to pursue the slightly fancier option of creating a sandboxed opam switch, you can instead run:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code/attachment-converter
$ make sandbox

If you don't know what a sandboxed opam switch is, we suggest not worrying about it and going with the make deps rule.

Next, you must install Attachment Converter's OS-level dependencies. For example:

Arch Linux:

$ pacman -S libreoffice pandoc libvips ghostscript

macOS:

$ brew install libreoffice pandoc vips ghostscript verapdf

WSL Debian:

$ apt install libreoffice pandoc vips ghostscript verapdf

Finally, Attachment Converter has one OS-level dependency that is not available through the standard repositories, called pdf2archive. This is a utility for converting PDF to PDF-A-1b.

Download pdf2archive:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code
$ git clone git@github.com:matteosecli/pdf2archive.git
$ cd pdf2archive
$ chmod +x ./pdf2archive
$ export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/your/source/code/pdf2archive

In our current pre-alpha stage, the shell scripts that Attachment Converter uses to invoke external conversion utilities are expected to be located at a specific filepath. This is expected to change soon as we flesh out our installation story. For this next step, please copy them to that location:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code/attachment-converter
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/attachment-converter/scripts
$ cp conversion-scripts/*.sh ~/.config/attachment-converter/scripts

You should now be ready to build Attachment Converter. To build:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code/attachment-converter
$ make

You can then install Attachment Converter by copying the binary to wherever you keep your binaries:

$ cd /path/to/your/source/code/attachment-converter
$ mv _build/default/main.exe /path/to/your/binaries/attc