[Techtalk] Gimp tutorials

[Akkana Peck]

A. Mani writes:
> I noticed a few issues with firefox :
> 
> printing of part of a page as pdf or djvu is not possible
> (with any reasonable plugins as well)
> 
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nuke-anything-enhanced/
> permits a weird workaround

I didn't have much luck using firefox/gecko libraries for rendering.
I needed a way of turning my HTML presentation slides into a single
PDF file (because tech conferences tend to freak out if you give
them a tarball of HTML files), and I had much better luck with
webkit and Python.  My writeup here:
http://shallowsky.com/blog/programming/html-slides-to-pdf.html
You probably won't be able to use my script directly because it's
optimized for the way I do HTML slides, but you could adapt it to
produce PDF from tutorial pages or anything else.

Miriam English writes:
> The trouble with pdf, djvu, ps, eps is that they are all
> paper-oriented, instead of screen-oriented. The best way to make a
> text+graphics document suitable for screen display is html. This is
> because it is designed to fit itself optimally to whatever
> resolution device you have.

Agreed 100%. PDF is difficult for me to read on a screen. Especially
a small screen, where if the type is large enough to read, I have to
scroll horizontally to read each line. Even if horizontal scroll
isn't a problem, it doesn't scroll well vertically since so much
vertical space is wasted on the bottom margin of this page and the
top margin of the next, a pointless waste when you're reading on
a screen.

I see people advocating djvu, but my one experience with a djvu book
wasn't very positive. It had all the limitations of PDF, plus there
was no reader for it available in the Debian repos (let alone for
an e-reader device). I did find one via a web search and was able
to read the book, but it was a lot of hassle.

PDF (and DJVU even more so) is also very hard to convert to cleaner,
wrappable formats like HTML. There's an economics book I've been
wanting to read, and it's available free online, but only as a PDF
where the text is in two columns side by side. The PDF is impossible
to read on a handheld device (5" or 6" screen) and there's no way to
convert 2-column PDF to any other format (I wasted an incredible
amount of time trying).

> The most futile aspect is that if dead-tree use is eliminated (as
> our impact on the planet ultimately requires us to do) then those
> inconvenient formats are rendered completely unnecessary because
> html was deliberately designed for electronic displays.

Of course lots of people make HTML that doesn't work on portable
devices (because of wide page sizes), but at least it's fairly easy
for a user to edit that out of the file if they need to.

> There is also another argument against pdf that has nothing to do
> with technology: Adobe has become (perhaps always was) a nasty
> corporation. It is not healthy to society or the market to help such
> companies to greater strength.

Agreed. I was sad that conferences tended to prefer PDF or even PPT
over .tar.gz. At least a lot of Linux conferences now are
discouraging PPT.

Maria McKinley writes:
> The problem is that there is no good alternative to pdf. Even on old
> machines, you can be pretty sure that people will be able to look at them,
> and there is no other format, besides html that you can be sure of.

HTML is a good alternative. EVERYBODY has an HTML viewer. But it
does have one big problem: there's no way to give someone a single
HTML file that includes linked files and embedded images.  You have
to resort to a zip or a tarball, and then browsers and similar HTML
viewers can't show it.

What we need is something like a single MIME encapsulated HTML file
-- like a .eml (email) file but without the email headers, just files,
mime types and attachments. The format is easy enough (MIME already
works) -- but we'd need to get all the major HTML rendering libraries
agreeing to use it. Then you could pass around papers and ebooks
written in HTML that people could read on any device.

	...Akkana