A few months ago I looked at the PDFs produced by ebookmaker and wondered if it would be possible to create a utility that made a PDF good enough to use as interior pages for a print-on-demand book. I have been experimenting with rst2pdf (the utility program that ebookmaker's PDF generation is based on) and I've published a bunch of trade paperback books on Kindle Direct Publishing that started out as my RST donations to Project Gutenberg. The first picture shows proof copies from all the books I've published with this method. The second picture shows just how nice the interior pages look. Pictures can float inside paragraphs and alongside paragraphs, math formulas and fractions are formatted beautifully, and words are hyphenated automatically. I did cover images with The GIMP using either pictures from the book itself or other art in the public domain. I used free fonts and sometimes made them fancier by adding drop shadows and distortion effects in The GIMP. Converting an RST file to a nicely formatted TEX file can be done in one or two afternoons. The TEX file produced by rst2pdf needs to be touched up with a text editor, but this is surprisingly little work. If you don't have an RST file a plain text file from PG can be turned into an RST file with very little work. That is what I did with *Ancient Manners,* James Simmons
Thanks for the kind words. I have become quite a fan of the RST method of doing a PG donation. I can't imagine how much work it would be to do some of my recent work without it. The four volumes of the Ramayana had hundreds of footnotes apiece. The books on aviation and electronics had hundreds of illustrations. All the books had tables of contents and some had lists of figures as well. Then I'd have to proofread and correct web pages and plain text files. Not only is RST a huge labor saver, the results it produces are outstanding. For just one example, in plain text files footnotes use superscript characters. As a bonus, converting a PG donation RST file to a printed book is amazingly quick and easy. It isn't the kind of thing you could fully automate--you need to do some fooling around with the generated TEX file to make a really good PDF--but I've gotten to the point where I can do a decent conversion in a couple of afternoons. I could write an article on how to do it for the PG site if there was interest. James Simmons On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 12:29 PM bowerbird <bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
james-
your results look excellent.
-bowerbird
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participants (3)
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bowerbird -
James Simmons -
Jeroen Hellingman