PDF for print publishing
We’ve got a poetry book, Doves Born of Flames, that was created in PressBooks.
Doves Born of Flames is a multilingual poetry anthology with poems in 18 different languages (translated into English) from poets around the world, focused on peace, justice, and healing. “With love and care, and deepest respect for our most precious resource DIVERSITY, Marie Boucher gathers the voices of human beings who have suffered mightily, yet retain tender honorable voices to tell their truths. If we listen, we too become more human. If we turn away, where do we deserve to live?” –Naomi Shihab Nye
This was the project that prompted me to re-figure out the whole PressBooks/cPanel setup. It was also the driver for the audio compression and leveling bash script.
Now we’re working through the issues with the print-on-demand provider. One issue was with images that were too big. Adobe Acrobat has a nice built-in way to deal with that.
- Choose “Compress a PDF” from the sidebar tools
- Choose “Advanced Optimization”
- The main fix for us was in Images where we needed to set all images to a max resolution of 300 ppi.
Hit OK and that’s all there is to it.
The “Preflight” option also allowed us to convert the image colors to CMYK. You can choose “analyze and fix” with this tool as well.
ePub and language direction
The error given was “(CSS-001): /EPUB/chapter-003-d986d98ad988-d8bad8b2d991d8a9.xhtml: The “direction” property must not be included in an EPUB Style Sheet.” PressBooks seems to spit this out automatically, but it might be something I did and forgot about.
So, we’ve got to remove that from the CSS and replace it with an inline setting. <span classe=”highlight”><p style=”direction: rtl;text-align: center”></span>
That’s like our previous workflow for personalizing the ePub (unzip, edit, re-package, do the mime stuff). I did not bother saving this one. I may regret that.
It is worth noting just how much work a project like this might generate and across a broad spectrum of technologies and skill sets. We’ve got everything from server admin to audio work to print publishing nuances in various file formats. I don’t think you’d easily predict this from the start either.
Capturing/Archiving a Netlify JS site
We had a group make a site on Netlify. It’s a React (I think) one-pager with js loading content based on interactions so HTTRACK for archiving doesn’t work well (at least I don’t think it does). I think AI probably had some role in the creation of the housing. My guess is that issues like this will become more common. I am solving the problem of getting our own copy of the content but editing in the future will be a hassle. You can see similar patterns creeping up with Claude artifacts or anything that makes web content without giving the knowledge or tools to edit it easily. AI to edit works, but can be really inefficient depending on a variety of factors.
I had to install Playwright, run the command below, and then click through the buttons/scroll to get the content.
npx playwright open --save-har=correlates.har/har.har https://correlates.netlify.app
I had already completely forgotten this and had to re-figure it out.
Listing Projects
I’m also going back and trying to list our DLINQ projects (like this poetry book) in ways that make it clear the range of support we can offer. Given how many times I’ve done similar things, you’d think I’d stop being surprised how many projects I forgot until prompted by emails, GitHub repos, or just directories under my /extras folder. This is also way more hassle than it appears and yet I will never have the time to do it in the moment consistently.