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elfsOne 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?
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?
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Date: 2006-09-01 10:29 pm (UTC)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.