On 11/23/06, Stephen Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > 3.) Can I have an HTML version? > > A) No, we like it pretty. > > > The interesting thing is, there's nothing in your layout or format that you > can't do with some nice standards-compliant HTML and CSS. It could look > identical as HTML-- and be significantly more "reachable" by people, easier > for them to use and read, link to, and so on and so forth. > > Plus you could stick some Google adwords ads on it :) > > But, really... if you're eventually wanting this to be a > printed/published/mailed sort of thing, I can understand why you'd want to do > it as a PDF... but you will be limiting your audience in the meantime. A lot > of people just find it too tedious and difficult, and if your goal is to > reach people and communicate.... > > Why not do both? Might take a bit more work-- but the layout you have isn't > that hard to do in HTML, and there's gotta be a way to html2pdf... I've never > wanted to, but there has to be. =) >
Thanks v. much for the comments. Not a week goes by that this limitation doesn't irk me. All I can say is that I feel your pain, and also I really appreciate the response, because the project succeeds only according to the enthusiasm that can be generated. So, why aren't we publishing in HTML and not worrying about PDF? * Document lodgement in online archives. PDFs are a nice bundled format which preserves formatting, paging etc, isn't resolution dependent * Page numbers and tables of contents * Lack of a WYSIWYG gui for advance HTML layouts fully supporting all browser differences. * Source application is currently OpenOffice, which *definitely* doesn't support good enough HTML output. * If you say LaTex, I'll eat your brain. Or my hat. Unless I'm seriously underrating it, but I don't think so. * Scribus crashed multiple times when I was testing it out using on our first version. I think it's too big. In my explorations, I have found: * pdf2html is a lame duck * html2pdf can't be done The only possibility is going from something like odt to both PDF and html, but you seriously lose out in using OpenOffice to generate the HTML. I haven't been able to identify a truly working upstream application from which both HTML and PDF can be derived. PDF2ASCII works okay, but you lose your images. Docbook format appears to be a possibility, but it lacks a good GUI for editing in, so you're talking raw XML. OpenOffice claims to support it, but I couldn't get it to work properly. Article submissions need to be handled in a variety of formats, usually word or OpenOffice are used, for example. It might be possible using Python and ReportLabs to *write* something which would support a layout which could be translated into HTML and PDF without a major loss of quality, but this is a major project in its own right. It would also require that authors make proper use of sections and heading options rather than just fiddling with the font size. <sigh>. Trust me, I thought about it. It still bugs me. It will probably bug me forever. At this stage, the only viable options I can see are to go to HTML as the primary format, increase the workload involved in typesetting and layout, and abandon the idea of a print-friendly layout, or to continue with the current situation despite its drawbacks. If anyone has any good ideas for how to cope as a publisher with these difficulties, I'm all ears. I want something that Just Works. If there's a Good Way to Do Things, I'll happily adopt it. Cheers, -T (Editor-In-Chief) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
