Twenty-two years late, but finally here

If you live in Ohio, and you're into S&M, or are gay, or have any interest in sex outside of the missionary position, get out of there now. Really. And make sure that the evil that has come to Ohio doesn't follow you wherever you go.

An Ohio legislative panel yesterday approved-- without debate or opposition-- a bill that would create a Civil Sex Offenders Registry. The law would allow the country prosecutors or, at the request of an aggreived citizen, a state judge, to place anyone-- anyone at all-- on the registry even if they have never been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime.

A person on the registry would be treated as a sex offender for the purpose of public notification: his name, photograph and address would be published on the Internet and community notification requirements would be in place wherever he lived. After six years he could petition the court to have his name removed. The court would consider any new complaints in that period and would interview the registered person to assess whether or not that person was likely to abuse in the future.

Ed Brayton has more. And I think he doesn't go far enough: I think every legislator who failed to consider this bill and let it go through unopposed should have a big fucking tattoo across his forehead: Destroyed lives without due process.

Typesetting Geekery of a Fine and Excellent Nature!

One of the things that I've been wracking my brains over is simply, how am I going to convert The Journal Entries into a collection of PDFs, or a compiled PDF? I thought about attacking it old-school, by actually doing all of the wrapper work in LaTeX^[?], but converting and embedding fonts and styles and, especially, sidebars and decorations is such a pain in the neck, especially since I don't know LaTeX all that well.

But... I can do WYSIWG^[?] programming, and I know Python^[?]. Enter Scribus, a fully scriptable and externally drivable program that can easily handle all of the commands I want to issue as commands, not some freakin' "memorize what I do" macros that then have to be edited in some language nobody understands.

Better yet, the text frames are linkable and will tell you when you've ceased overflow. So it's possible to cast alternating pages succesfully, and detect when you've cast the last page, adjust it appropriately, and see if there's enough room for the copyright notice and colophon and, if so, fit it in or generate a new page for the material. And it's all in python, so it'll be straightforwrd for me to code.

Sweet! Put it in a loop and leave it all night (believe me, it'll take a while to do this for all the stories) and viola', sexy PDFs ready to go.

Now, I just have to code it up. "Just." Yeah, right.

Note that I tend to believe that PDFs are primarily for printing. Given that, are there any PDF documents you've seen that you've really enjoyed reading? That, from a design perspective, made you happy to print and read them?