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

[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