[FM Discuss] [Booki-dev] Challenges in rendering automatic covers

[adam]

*very* interesting...

actually, why not just use html and convert to pdf?

adam


On 10/14/2011 01:50 PM, Tuukka Hastrup wrote:
>
> I made some progress with help from Elisa on IRC.
>
> First, she sent this example of what kind of a result we're ideally
> targetting, although it could be much simpler at this point:
> http://tuukka.iki.fi/tmp/example-cover.png
>
> Second, a new idea to alternatively use Scribus for this came up in the
> discussion, as Scribus is meant for page-making given text and image
> assets. Unfortunately, on the IRC channel #scribus, I heard that the
> efforts to make Scribus suitable for automatic rendering are still
> experimental. Thus, someone could explore e.g. running Scribus headless
> with Xvfb and scripting it with Scribus Scripter2 which was part of the
> GSOC this year:
> http://scripter2.jainbasil.net/
> http://jainbasil.net/scripter2/
>
> Third, on the IRC channel #inkscape, I learned about the current
> limitations of the SVG approach such as flowed text (automated
> text-layout) being Inkscape-only and Inkscape not supporting
> high-quality rendering of SVG images nested within an outer SVG image.
> It might be possible to convert the flowed text to non-flowed with
> Inkscape then use something like wkhtmltopdf to convert standard SVG to
> PDF. wkhtmltopdf crashes when I try to convert an SVG though. The link I
> got about nested SVG in Inkscape was this:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.user/14208
>
> The three earlier issues still remain as well:
>
> 2011-10-14 02:05, Tuukka Hastrup wrote:
>> I hit some "challenges" trying to render book covers automatically as
>> needed for lulu.com integration. At the moment, I can render a blank PDF
>> of the right dimensions ;-) I'm wondering if anyone else has ideas on
>> how to solve (or work around) these:
>>
>> 1. How to express in SVG a float layout similar to an IMG tag floating
>> on the right of a text paragraph in HTML?
>>
>> 2. Alternatively, how to combine separate HTML-to-PDF renderings of a
>> front cover, spine, and back cover into a single PDF *page*?
>>
>> 3. In either case. how to scale the font size of the book title in SVG
>> *or* HTML so that the title width matches the horizontal page available
>> in the cover?
>>
>> Actually, I wouldn't mind if someone else wanted to whip up something
>> for this as it's only tangential even though required for the lulu.com
>> integration.
>>
>>
>> Regards
>> Tuukka
>>
>> P.S. Here's what I use for the blank test PDFs: wkhtmltopdf-i386
>> --page-width 210 --page-height 297 --load-error-handling ignore
>> /dev/zero a4.pdf
>>
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Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
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