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

  • From: Ingo Kloecker <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2014 21:02:02 +0100

On Friday 07 November 2014 09:52:20 Jonathan Blake wrote:
> 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.

No problem.


> > 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.)?

Yes, I think so. But it's been too long since I actually did this. So, 
I'll have to look into it.


> > 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.

Okay. Then I'll try to provide a prototype.


> 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.

I have committed the differences between generated LaTeX and revised 
LaTeX as diff/patch files to SVN. The Makefile automatically applies 
those patches after regenerating the LaTeX. So, the process of updating 
the PDFs after changes in the XMLs is already pretty well optimized. 
Currently, I'm using a single patch file per book. I'm pondering 
spliting this patch into multiple patches covering different aspects. 
This would simplify transfering some of the patches to other books, e.g. 
the books in the same series often need a few very similar changes. 
Moreover, adjusting smaller patch files to changes in the XML should be 
easier than adjusting small parts of a single larger patch file.

All this thinking and talking about the PDFs is making me want to look 
into them again. But not in the next two weeks.


Regards,
Ingo


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