[Etoys] QuickGuides available as a .pdf file

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 15.06.2008, at 19:56, Ted Kaehler wrote:

> At 1:03 PM +0200 6/15/08, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Are you sure you uploaded the right PDF? This looks like nothing
>> more than a web page printed as PDF, which is not too useful, since
>> one could easily print the html page directly.
>
> Bert,
> 	Yes, it is indeed the web pages combined into a PDF.  It is
> useful for downloading all the guides at once, and having them all in
> one document.  Fetching and printing the web pages separately would
> take hours.  And, each would have the annoying sidebar on the first
> page.

I thought you generated the HTML embedding the guides in one big page,  
so you could put that on a website for everyone to print.

>> Now, if it was arranged so that 4 guides are on each page, if there
>> were page numbers and a table of contents, that would be useful.
>
> Yes, what application would allow me to do this under program
> control?  I have no experience in creating PDFs.
> 	 I may be able to produce four guides up on a page, and
> landscape mode, and page numbers.  How do I make a table of contents?

HTML might be the simplest. You just write a method that generates the  
HTML code for the one big page, with a TOC at the beginning, and say  
H1 headings for each 2x2 group guides. In a browser that would appear  
as one long page. But by adding a "page-break-before: always" style to  
the H1 heading you can ensure page breaks when printing.

>> What would be even better (though much more work indeed) is to
>> create a PDF directly by exporting the guides as PostScript, not
>> take the bitmaps. That should considerably reduce the size of the
>> PDF and have a better quality (at least in the parts where actual
>> morphs embedded instead of screen-grabs of them)
>>
>> Unfortunately the PostScript exporter never worked really well,
>
> Yep, I tried it too.  Maybe we could ask for a volunteer to improve
> the PostScript writer enough to export the guides?
> 	If you fixed things to produce your example, please upload
> your changes.  There seems to be a font size issue.

I did.

- Bert -

>> so the current results (after patching it to work at all) are
>> somewhat unsatisfactory, see attachment. I exported one book (a
>> guide with 4 pages) as PS and converted it to PDF using Preview.app
>> on my Mac.
>>
>> - Bert -