If I know two things...

One of the other things I did this weekend was write an HTML to PDF engine. The HTML it currently speaks is extremely limited and still borked, but I'm definitely on the right track. I intend it to parse only a subset of full HTML, basically that subset necessary to render my stories and not much more. And this isn't your grandma's HTML to PDF renderer, because I'm using the Scribus rendering engine.

This means that many features are radically customizeable, such as text placement, titling and rendering (with a hand-written title plugin, but I'll provide three generics-- one for Bloody Beth, one for Aimee', and the base generic-- the Journal Entries requires a customized titler for the date handler), the addition of copyright notices, and so forth. Even better, the frontpage, interior pages, and copyright notice can all be created using Scribus Templates, so the look and feel will be as sweet as any website you've ever seen-- which is important, because so many traditional HTML to PDF converters strip out much of the look and feel, much of the ambiance, of a story site.

I know two things: I know the Scribus program, and I know Python. And now Scribus's internal automation toolkit is written in Python. I can easily write a program that will suck down the stories from the site in HTML, parse them out into PDF using templates I create and then define in a configuration/build file, and render each one as a unique PDF, or combine story arcs into a larger "book" format, or even pack the entire series as one humungous document. (I doubt anyone wants that, though.)

There is a bug in Scribus: When linking text serial frames for overflow, frame two correctly identifies the overflow it accepted from frame one, but frame three always reports its overflow as zero, indicating that the story content is complete. This is a bug. When rendering pages in the Scribus engine, the autoredraw feature is turned off to save CPU and time, but this interferes with the overflow calculation. After calling scribus.linkTextFrames(), you must call scribus.redrawAll() to force the overflow calculation to update.

And I have one major bug in my code: I don't know what to do with <blockquote> blocks yet. I want to be able to do it in the text stream. If I can't, the alternative will be to render it as its own linked frame with special behaviors, but that will require that I take over page-and-frame-size management duties from the Scribus engine, and I really don't want to do that. I would need to keep a parallel linked list of frames, and hand-calculate how much space was needed, and break blockquotes that cross page boundaries, and a whole bunch of other things that really, I shouldn't be worrying about. And I use blockquotes quite often in my stories.

Site Progress

As I've noted before, I'm in the process of revising the site. I'm not going to pull any punches about it: I'm trying to make the site pay for itself and the ocassional cup of coffee, something it has barely done five years in a row. The Journal Entries site is mostly done, and I now have a styled HTML page with a copyright notice and a templatized header, a non-styled HTML page with no template and no graphics, a plain text edition, and a complete set of (pre-rendered) PalmDoc formatted versions suitable for the PalmOS readers. My reader of choice is CSpotRun, and all of the pages look great in that. I'll also be putting up the PDF editions as soon as I get the PDF generator up and running; that might be in a few weeks.

I also have to make the same setup work for the Bloody Beth and Aimee sites, so it'll still be a while before everything is going. But there will be an RSS feed and so forth, so that should be fun. I've written most of the site in Ruby, although the on-site blog is unavoidably in WordPress PHP. I am not shutting down my LJ, but it'll be much less about this stuff. I'll be moving the writing and site management issues to the PendorWright site, and leave site this to talk about my family and friends. I wonder if there's a WordPress emacs module?

The wiki isn't up yet, and the pullquotes module is a little borken. I'm still getting it all together, but at least I have something I can see.

Why do I do this to myself?

I'm not tagging this one "review" because I haven't gotten that far into the book to make the review worthwhile. The book in question is Mandy Roth's Droid Wars: Performance Criteria, and it falls into that category of "romantic SF erotica" that I absolutely cannot stand: the writer got her ideas about androids from Star Trek. The place where I stopped was here:

Oh, he certainly was perfection at its finest. Too bad he'd have little interest in sex. Even knowing that previous attempts at endowing androids with a sexual drive or the need to procreate had failed, Aeron had still labored over hers, modifying the equipment necessary to partake in sexual acts. It just didn't seem right to create a man, only to rob him of what made him male.

Okay, writers and other idiots, listen up: "Android" is a fancy word for "a robot that looks like a human being." Common SF parlance makes it a perjorative. Unless you're being clever and riffing off SF tropes about cultures having lost some measure of control or understanding of their own technology-- and Ms. Roth is not that clever-- the paragraph I quoted above is absolute nonsense. If you can program an android to be "passable" in all other ways, there is absolutely no reason you cannot program him to want, or seem to want, to completely fuck your brains out to your satisfaction. And robots are manufactured items: they have no need for "procreation" in the traditional sense.

If, as Ms. Roth seems to imply later, she's taken the rare brain-dead soldier and rebuilt him into the perfect killing machine, and he can still function the way she implies in all other ways, then the proscription that he be sexually dysfunctional is a sheer macguffin of the "thrown with great force" category. It simply makes no sense in the context of all the other technology she has available to her. The heroine's knowledge that "previous attempts have failed" to produce the sex machine result weakens the story even more: how many brain-dead soldiers have they had to rewire to satisfaction? She goes on to state that the victim, her beloved, was dead for an hour before she got her hands on him-- so it's not even science, it's cybernetic taxidermy! Even worse, this is a universe that should have gone asymptotic a long, long time ago. Like the atrocious Nyssa's Guardian by Gaby Reese that I panned a couple of months ago, this is bad SF in so many ways, lacking any real knowledge of the "science" part that makes SF meaningful.

Stories flow from first principles. Ms. Roth's principles are confused and broken: her universe asks for more than it can deliver, because it demands far more knowledge that Ms. Roth has at hand.

I really have to stop expecting the SF erotica writers to respect the SF.

Self-imposed slush pile update

I haven't done one of these in a while, so it's time to get on top of the slush pile and start describing the State of the Elf's Literary Ambitions.

( As long as ever! )