The DAISY Pipeline FAQ

The DAISY Pipeline is a suite of tools designed to meet the varied and increasing production needs of the DAISY community by providing a cross-platform, customizable and extensible framework for document- and DTB-related transformations. It supports the migration of digital content to various formats efficiently and economically, facilitating both production and distribution of DAISY DTBs.

The DAISY Pipeline is primarily addressed at organizations and companies involved in DAISY production. However, its use is not restricted to the DAISY membership.

The Pipeline is a collaborative project hosted by the DAISY Consortium, with numerous organizations participating and contributing to the development. Most contributions are open source, and reside at the DAISY Pipeline Sourceforge project.

Nothing! The DAISY Pipeline is free and open source software available under LGPL, the GNU Lesser General Public License, to any organization, commercial company or individual.

The DAISY Pipeline uses cross platform technology and is currently available for Windows (98, Me, XP), Mac OS X (PPC or Intel), and Linux.

Of course! The DAISY Pipeline is an open source collaborative software development project and much functionality is still needed. If you would like to join the DAISY open source community and contribute to the development of the Pipeline, please contact Markus Gylling, DAISY International Technical Development Coordinator, using the Contact Us Form on the DAISY Web site. Please select the "Project DAISY Pipeline" Category.

Users of the DAISY Pipeline are also encouraged to contribute by providing feature requests and bug reports through the respective trackers at the SourceForge project site

You can regularly check the News section of the DAISY Pipeline website, or if you're a DAISY Member please please subscribe to the DAISY Pipeline Interest Group mailing list.

For general questions about the DAISY Pipeline, please contact Markus Gylling, DAISY International Technical Development Coordinator, using the Contact Us Form located on the DAISY Web site (select the "Project DAISY Pipeline" Category).

For technical questions, you can use the developers' mailing lists: daisymfc-developer@lists.sourceforge.net or daisymfcgui-developer@lists.sourceforge.net.

The website download section contains links the the latest release.

You can also visit the Pipeline Core Download Area or the Pipeline GUI Download Area on SourceForge for more options.

Installers are now provided for both Windows and Mac OS X. For further detailed explanation, be sure to read the installation instructions.

In order to run the Daisy Pipeline, you need to have the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 5 or later installed on your system.

Also, some third-party executables are required for some transformers. Be sure to read the configuration section of the installation documentation.

The DAISY Pipeline GUI is built on technology using Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) APIs to render user interface elements accessible to assistive technology. It has been successfully tested with popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes.

See also the FAQ item "Is there a workaround for known accessibility issues ?"

Some scripts are available for JAWS in the code repository to improve the user experience on the DAISY Pipeline GUI with this screen reader. These scripts also provide some help about the most complex controls.

Note that these scripts are specific to JAWS and are only provided as a temporary optional solution.

Almost all of the key bindings available in the DAISY Pipeline GUI are configurable in the Keys preference dialog. This dialog is accessible via the "Window → Preferences" menu bar item.

You can press the F6 key to toggle between the documentation index and the corresponding html document.

This may come from either an incomplete Java installation, or the JVM location not being listed in your system path.

If you have done it already, please download a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and install it.

Make sure your system PATH points to the installed Java runtime (on Windows, the PATH is accessible via Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables)

Alternatively, you can manually specify the location of your Java runtime by adding following lines to the DAISY Pipeline.ini configuration file (located in the installation directory):

  -vm
  c:/path/to/javaw.exe

This is a technical limitation: some Java Virtual Machines (JVM) put restrictions on the total amount of memory available on the heap.

You can for instance tell the JVM to let the heap grow to 512 MB by appending the line

-Xmx512m

to the DAISY Pipeline.ini configuration file (located in the installation directory)

Run java -X for the list of options your JVM accepts.

These "unable to load" warnings occur because the path to some third-party executable (Lame, Python) has not been set. These paths are configurable in the Paths preference dialog that can be reached from the Window → Preferences menu item. For detailed explanation please refer to the installation documentation.

This message is due to some error when loading the corresponding scripts. See the FAQ item: "The message view says "Unable to load script <a script name>.taskScript", what can I do ?".

TAB is normally used for moving to the next control in the GUI and Shift+TAB to the previous control. However TAB is also used to jump to the next control inside a Web browser. Once in the browser control, it is difficult to leave the browser using TAB because tab will jump to next link in the html page instead of jumping to the next Pipeline GUI control. It was therefore decided to remove the browser control from the TAB list, and to use the F6 key for toggling between the documentation index and the documentation page.

Note that the same behavior can be experienced when browsing CHM Help document with a topic tree view on the left pane and the corresponding html document on the right pane.

This was an error introduced in the 20071221 release, which was fixed on January 4, 2008. Please re-download the Pipeline.

See also the news item on the topic.

To report a bug, please sign on to SourceForge, and use the DAISY Pipeline Bug tracker. If you are sure this is a bug that pertains to the GUI, please use the DAISY Pipeline GUI Bug tracker. See the "Reporting a Bug" documentation for further detail.

Pipeline messages and error log can be exported as text files on your file system:

To export the Pipeline messages, go to the Messages View and use the "Export Messages" button on the view toolbar.

To export the debug log, go to the Error Log View (Window > Show View > Error Log) and use the "Export Log" button on the view toolbar.