Meg’s book: Laura’s Troubles

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Cover of Meg's book

For Christmas, my daughter Meg gave me a hardback book which she had made herself (with help from Bear), using one of the many on-line design-your-own-book outfits, Pixum. Pixum provides a Linux version of their book-design software, which is notable and encouraging. But I could see no obvious way of exporting to PDF, and wanted to send a soft copy to my parents.

The file format used by Pixum’s software is XML, and it wasn’t too tricky to work out enough of the details to produce a reasonable facsimile in PDF, using various Python packages (ElementTree, Python Imaging Library, BeautifulSoup, tinycss, ReportLab’s Pdf Library). I was not able to get the text positioning to exactly match the original printed version, but close enough.

Here is the result. Thank you very much, Meg!