Note crosspost. c.l.postscript because I can imagine the people reading
that group have more expirience with non-home printing, and c.p.printers because printers are involved.
Background:
There are a _wealth_ of public domain books that have been scanned and /
or OCRed available on the net now. These are great for reading on
computer devices, but what if I want a print copy?
I can, and have, naively send them to a local laser printer and get a
stack of US-Letter output. I don't really like the look or the usability
of that. Beyond the page count that I can easily staple, it's not a good format.
I have also tried, once, the process of turning some 500 pieces of email
into a bound epistolary. (Maybe e-epistolary be correct for e-mail? :^) )
For that I scoured the net for a good Latex template for the book, and finding none I really liked. There were a lot suitable for short
technical documents, and few good for an entire book. Some pain points: formatting chapters, table of contents, the perfect-bound wrap-around
cover, flowing non-prose text properly (eg embeded poems). I didn't have
any illustrations to deal with in that book, but that looks intimidating, too. Reseach papers have a very different idea of frontmatter than
novels or non-fiction books. Reseach papers need a lot more support for
foot or endnotes.
I did eventually get a PDF built with a "fiction novel" template. I made
time based divisions of the email into the chapters for for that. Then I
had Blurb (.com) print the thing for me as a trade paperback size
perfect bound book.
It's a lot better than a stack of US-Letter sized pages, but it still
leaves a lot to be desired.
Request:
So with that background, I'm curious if people know good ways to print
free ebooks. I'll give two links, to two different books at different
sites (which share the same title) as example texts:
https://archive.org/details/cu31924002801979
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26014
With the file formats there, and the whole world of printing services,
what's the easiest way to get a respectable looking printed book, that
would be conviently sized and sturdy enough to take on a field trip?
Budget is not unlimited, but not too constrained. Time to prepare the document for publishing is more constrained.
The Batty book, eg, has a lot of detail on making field expeditions to collect samples, so that would be a book you might want to carry off
into the field.
(I have "vintage" bound copies of both of those, and have read both. I present them as examples where I have a known existing thing to compare
it to. Both have extensive illustations, and the occaisional table of
data. The Browne volume has a fold out map, Plate V, kinda poorly
reproduced at Gutenberg.)
Elijah
------
kinda surprised more people don't want to do this
On 2/12/2021 2:00 PM, Eli the Bearded wrote:
kinda surprised more people don't want to do thisI use www.lulu.com for printing and binding my five computer software manuals. Each is approximately 300 pages and printed on 8.5 inch by
11.0 inch paper. www.lulu.com requires a PDF for the body, the front
cover, the spine, and the back cover. Four PDFs. The cost for each
manual is around $14.
Background:
There are a _wealth_ of public domain books that have been scanned and /
or OCRed available on the net now. These are great for reading on
computer devices, but what if I want a print copy?
I can, and have, naively send them to a local laser printer and get a
stack of US-Letter output. I don't really like the look or the usability
of that. Beyond the page count that I can easily staple, it's not a good format.
The output format was A5 pages, to be arranged into two
single-sided A4 print jobs performed in sequence to produce
double-sided A4 pages that were cut in half to produce the
double-sided A5 pages ready for perfect binding. I did all the
printing and binding myself, so this was designed to suit my own
production process.
My preference was to have the page numbers on the outside edge of
the pages, so they needed to alternate sides on each page, which
caused me a lot more trouble than it should have.
Generation of the A5 document was done in Libre Office using a
Libre Office Basic script, which was a choice I soon regretted
because a lot of things didn't seem to work properly. That produced
the A5 document in Postscript, which I reformatted into the two A4
Postscript print jobs using psutils.
I only ever attempted novels in plain text as input, never any
images.
In c.l.postscript and c.p.printers, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
The output format was A5 pages, to be arranged into two
single-sided A4 print jobs performed in sequence to produce
double-sided A4 pages that were cut in half to produce the
double-sided A5 pages ready for perfect binding. I did all the
printing and binding myself, so this was designed to suit my own
production process.
Do you have a guillotine paper cutter, or were you using something else? Having once used a proper guillotine (clamps paper, then cuts straight
down) I've become very not a fan of the non-clamp swing arm style.
Faced with doing something like that myself, I'd probably be more
inclined to just buy pre-cut reams in the smaller size and print on
those in regular duplex. It would also make the imposition easier.
Although I usually use US Letter, my printer supports down to A6
from the paper tray and I know how to buy "exotic" sizes.
Generation of the A5 document was done in Libre Office using a
Libre Office Basic script, which was a choice I soon regretted
because a lot of things didn't seem to work properly. That produced
the A5 document in Postscript, which I reformatted into the two A4
Postscript print jobs using psutils.
Creating of some intermediate format via scripting has been suggested to
me, but no one has pointed me to an easy way to do that. I don't want to
try my hand a *roff template; I haven't done anything but man pages in
20+ years. I don't know Tex/Latex well enough to create my own
templates. And I looked briefly at Sile[*] which tries to modernize
layout and takes Knuth's basic line breaking / filling system and using
that for both lines and larger blocks: the better to avoid orphaned
words or lines. Sile gave me a lot of compile trouble on my (then) older Ubuntu and I never really went back.
I only ever attempted novels in plain text as input, never any
images.
Many novels have images, too. I selected the (commercially printed)
version of _Moby Dick_ I'm reading now because of the Rockwell Kent illustrations. Those are not in public domain yet, being from 1930.
I was thinking of books like _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ as probably good
to illustrate. There are a lot of now public domain pictures for that
book, and not so many print versions with those pictures. When I read
it, the copy had no illustrations. The illustrations are part of what
gave it its naughty reputation. The text never really goes further than
"she surrendered all to me" style details.
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