Typesetting Geekery of a Fine and Excellent Nature!

[elfs]

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?

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

Hey, Elf ... you know there's this Intarweb thing and folks use HTML to mark up copy, etc.? :-)

Why not just use PDF Writer or Acrobat Distiller or any of the other "PDF generating printer drivers" to turn your rendered HTML into PDF?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I suppose. But (a) I have linux, not one of those fancy-schmancy Macintoshes, and (b) won't it just look like a web page then? Scribus has the same features, with some nifty templating besides.

[dossy.livejournal.com]

"(a) I have linux, not one of those fancy-schmancy Macintoshes,"

Then you have Ghostscript. Presumably your Linux-based browser, if it has printing capability, can probably generate PostScript. Then, use Ghostscript to convert PostScript to PDF.

"(b) won't it just look like a web page then? Scribus has the same features, with some nifty templating besides."

You can do templating in a web environment (SSI, CGI, PHP, etc.) ... ?

But, yes, it will look like a web page, then. Make an attractive looking web page for reading your content ... ?

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Lately I haven't enjoyed reading pdf's at all because they're all invoices. At least it's not my money. :)

At that airplane maker I used to work for pdf's were a lifesaver. You could zoom into the tiniest detail and check all the border data, etc. without worrying about messing up the engineers' work.

As for straight reading that zoom feature is invaluable to blind folks like me. Reading after printing them though, depends on how good your scanned copy was. The print can fade after enough photo and even electronic copy generations. A good solid black on white sans serif 12 point or larger helps alot though.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Ah. These won't be scanned. Rendered in-line properly, the way typeset documents are meant to be done. Sounds like your engineers used vector graphics, which scale up very nicely.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

I really dislike PDF's, they cause my browser to hang, first and foremost. When I scroll down they can be jerky and I generally stay away from them. I'd really rather you didn't take one of my most favorite websites and fill it full of PDFs. Given the frustration I have with PDFs, I'll probably stop reading the stories :-( Or I will start saving to my computer and printing them....How many reams of paper would that take at this point? On the other hand, it is yours so do with it what you wish. Just my perspective on the matter

~E

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not going to make it mandatory! I just wanted to provide the option for them that like it, the perverts. I was planning on having an "alternative formats" page with PDFs and PDB (Palm Docbook, an e-book reader format). The PDFs would be primarily for printing only, since some people do print them.

The real issue here is automating the process. I have no intention of straying from my own evolved development strategy without really good reason, and HTML will be the primary delivery mechanism of choice.

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

Oh good....just about gave me premature grey hair. ;-)

~E

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd clean up the HTML to ake it XML compliant, and then write an XSLT to generate a PDF vi FOP. Seems a whole lot simpler to me than writig actual code.

Actually I'd probably generate an RTF first and then read it into Open Office for some final manual tweaking and then save it as PDF from that, editing PDF's is annoying.

On reading PDF's, I do it all the time, so many technical documents are only available in PDF so I have to, and I don;t realynd it, but I prefer raw HTML
as page breaks and all the other unexccesary crap added by doduments made to be printed are annoying when reading on line.

It helps if the authors have added the contents page as a proper contents page,so you can navigate using it in the apropriate window, and it also helps, if it was originally a web document, if the hyperlinks still work.

It also helps if the PDF is writable (i.e: not protected) so you can leave bookmarks in the file.

[klrmn.livejournal.com]

a long long time ago, i thought to myself "you know, i'd really like to have a bound copy of the Journal Entries". thus far it still hasn't happened, because i am too lazy to go through and print each of the documents seperately, and don't really have a good plan for binding it into some convenient size.

but i'm very happy to continue reading new stories as they come out.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Pretty easy to make bound books from regular printouts. Works better if you have a duplex printer, of course, otherwise things are even bulkier. Even best is if you can find a source for trade-paperback sized paper, so that it's not always scrapbook sized, but it's still pretty readable even with single-sided regular sized paper.

Take 1 to 1 1/2 inch stack of your printout. Cut sheet of posterboard in half, trim to fit wrapped around your printout with a couple inches overlap. Use a long flatedge to carefully crease this 'cover' to square it off good for the back binding. Next step takes a couple of bricks, a couple of c-clamps, an oven, a cookie sheet, and some kind of meltable glue. Gluesticks _will_ work, but don't work well. What we found that worked best are old-fashioned glue strips, about half an inch wide and 3/16 thick.

Set your cover on the table, back binding against the surface, and put a line of solid glue pieces from top to bottom, except for about an inch at either end. Use the bricks to prop the binding up on the cookie sheet so that it's standing up, the glue end down, and put it in the oven just until the glue's melted. (oven temp need to be low, no more than about 200F, and be sure it doesn't brush the oven sides, or it can still catch on fire). Should take about five minutes. Carefully remove, set on solid flat surface. Make sure your sheaf of paper is all neatly tapped down (and maybe clamped near the bottom), then carefully slide into the cover and press the inner edge firmly into the glue. Don't let the paper fan out while you're doing this, or it'll be all lumpy and weird. A good way to ensure it doesn't fan is to use two long flat pieces of wood or metal, clamped firmly about an inch from the edge. Hold in place for half a minute or so while the glue sets and cools enough that it won't burn you, then lift the whole thing, tap the flat of the bound side hard against the table and rub it smooth, then lay it flat and use something heavy to smooth the top, then the bottom along where it's bound. Trim any glue from the top and bottom edge, then trim the cover as much as you like. If things didn't set quite right, you can always pop the whole thing back in the oven (but clamp it at top and bottom, so things don't shift out of place) and remelt the glue enough to neaten it up. Once it's done, you can use transparent 'instant laminating' sheets to toughen it up, maybe applying a suitable picture to the front cover and any text you want to print out for the back or binding first.

Blech... that sound more complicated than it is. Really, it's not much trouble, and you can get a good-sized volume made in about 15 minutes total. Having two people helps, but isn't a necessity. It took us half an hour to think up the idea, a couple of tries (no more than another hour) to figure out what worked best, and after that we never had any problems. We made about a dozen 'books' that way, and they turned out to be tougher than you'd ever imagine. Several very book-abusive years later, they're still intact, and that's without reinforcing the covers (I didn't actually like the books, so I wasn't willing to contribute any artistic effort, you see) or anything. Once, some pages did start to loosen, but it was on one of the first ones we did, and I think we just didn't have enough glue. Popping it in the oven and resetting it fixed the problem easily (incidentally, that works for regular paperbacks that are coming loose from their covers, too). Anyway, it makes nice, neat volumes out of printouts.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Convert to LaTeX, or some other semantic markup format. Then mechanically convert to PDF, SGML, DocBook, Gnu Info, (X)HTML, PostScript, Microsoft Help Files, etc. etc. etc.

Make the computer do the work for you.

BTW, I presume you've been introduced to LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) and TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/).

[rkda.livejournal.com]

Some of your fans are Mac users. I for one, would be happy to *print* all your stories to PDF and then send you a link to the results.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

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?

Yeah, actually. Usually PDF's are annoying, because what I'm reading is something I'm not going to bother to print out, and I'd prefer to just have it in html form in a browser or plain text form. However, I've recently bought some PDF versions of RPG supplements, and given that the nice tables and artwork and such is part of what I like about those books, I definitely prefer them as PDF's, and intend to print them out.

So they can be the most appropriate format. I just wish they worked better for online reading.

s/primarily/only/

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

But that seems to be a given...

OpenOffice.org (yes, that's really the full name) prints to PDF and does templating too, so you could work in that. And last time I checked their file format was just a ZIP of a couple of XML documents, so that's as easy to turn documents into.

Not to pull you away from Scribus, I actually have enough issues with OOo that I'm happy to encourage a robust ecosystem beyond it.

For page layouts that I like... well... I think dead trees are the past and we're beyond that now, but I've found the recent Terry Pratchett hardcovers use a font and spacing that I get along with well.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who is just about totally blind I tend to find I convert all the PDFs I get to text anyway, but I can see their value for printing.

I'm gald you said you'll keep HTML as the main delivery system. Access to PFDFs with specialist speech software has improved a lot, but is still really annoying.

Although having all the stories in an archive would be nice, for offline reading. Give me something to do on long bus trips ;)