[projectaon] Re: Do we need PDF editions of the books? If yes, why?

  • From: Jonathan Blake <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Project Aon List <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2014 09:52:20 -0800

On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Ingo Kloecker
<projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [I reply to my own message, but I quote Jon's reply from the "Create A
> Font" thread because I want to keep the PDF discussion in this thread.]

Sorry for the thread confusion.

> On Monday 03 November 2014 14:56:53 Jonathan Blake wrote:
>
>> What are the technical obstacles?
>
> The main obstacle is setting everything up. But that needs to be done
> only once (unless an OS upgrade breaks something). Once the setup is
> done it's mostly a lot of little details that need to be done for every
> book, like replacing the images of the weapons and equipment with
> scalable images, rotating and positioning some of the large images
> (which originally have been two page images), optimizing the layout of
> the map, some page break optimization, illustration caption optimization
> (the hardcoded line breaks in the captions don't really work that good
> for the PDFs), etc.

Can some of those issues be solved by adding markup to the XML files
(e.g. including scalable images in the illustration markup, including
rotated images, ignoring hard line breaks when we generate the LaTeX,
etc.)?

> BTW, if we want to put the focus of the PDFs on offline reading rather
> than printing then we could think about using a different layout for the
> numbered sections. I had the idea to put each numbered section on a
> different page. This would make the look and feel of the PDFs more like
> the multi-page HTML version. This layout has the advantage that reading
> one numbered section does not spoil other numbered sections that also
> happen to be on the same page. This layout would also avoid most
> problems with suboptimal page breaks in the numbered section part of the
> books because most numbered sections are too short to be affected by a
> page break. OTOH, this layout would give the PDFs a very different look
> and feel than the actual books. Anyway, that was just an idea for the
> PDFs that crossed my mind. I'm not really sure whether it's a useful
> idea.

I like your idea. It simplifies a lot of things, and if we're not
encouraging readers to print these, then there's no need to minimize
the number of pages.

Also, I still wonder if generating the LaTeX, doing any manual
corrections, and then committing that revised LaTeX to SVN might be
useful. That way minor changes to the books could easily be merged in
without needing to redo the manual corrections, just checking that the
changes haven't affected the layout. I think this could work as long
as there weren't any major revisions to the way the LaTeX is
generated.

--
Jon

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