{"id":302,"date":"2013-01-15T21:10:12","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T06:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blg2\/?p=302"},"modified":"2025-01-23T14:35:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T14:35:42","slug":"post-296","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/?p=302","title":{"rendered":"Marlowe&#8217;s book: Laura&#8217;s Troubles"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1.75em;\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/cover-small.jpg\" alt=\"Cover of Meg's book\" \/><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>For Christmas, my daughter Marlowe 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.<\/p>\n<p>The file format used by Pixum&#8217;s software is XML, and it wasn&#8217;t too tricky to work out enough of the details to produce a reasonable facsimile in PDF, using various Python packages (<a href=\"http:\/\/docs.python.org\/2\/library\/xml.etree.elementtree.html\">ElementTree<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pythonware.com\/library\/pil\/handbook\/index.htm\">Python Imaging Library<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crummy.com\/software\/BeautifulSoup\/\">BeautifulSoup<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/packages.python.org\/tinycss\/index.html\">tinycss<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reportlab.com\/software\/opensource\/rl-toolkit\/\">ReportLab&#8217;s Pdf Library<\/a>). I was not able to get the text positioning to exactly match the original printed version, but close enough.<\/p>\n<p>Here is the result. Thank you very much, Marlowe!<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/Lauras-Troubles-Meg-North.pdf\">Laura&#8217;s Troubles, by Marlowe North<\/a> [15MB PDF]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Christmas, my daughter Marlowe 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&#8217;s software is XML, and it wasn&#8217;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&#8217;s Pdf Library). I was not able to get the text positioning to exactly match the original printed version,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","comments-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4014,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/4014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}