I'm writing a document in Lyx, an editor for Latex. Is there any fast way to tell Lyx that I want the first page to be the cover of my document?
Thank you.
The section 'Add the Cover Using LyX' in 'How to Create & Publish Your E-Book Using Free Tools' by John McDevitt describes a good way of adding a cover to a book in LyX. I have used it and was positively surprised how well it turned out. See page 61 in the pdf (or page 72 in the Scribd box) here: http://awarewriter.wordpress.com/e-book/
This method makes an external pdf the cover as page 0, so goto page numbers still work in the pdf. It is not exactly what you asked for, but you can get a really good result by designing the cover in a photo/drawing program, exporting that as a single page pdf, and then including it using this method.
Related
I've read about the ePub format, standard, structure, readers, tools and available developer techniques to manipulate/convert/create ePubs but there is no such thing as a magical function (so far) to extract a particular length of characters to create an excerpt of the book. And that's precisely what I'm looking for: A way to extract the first X words of an ePub.
The first approach I'm considering (not my favorite btw) is creating a parser to read all the ePub metadata and start parsing the xml files in the right order until I have enough words to create the excerpt of a determined ePub (I will appreciate some feedback in this direction)
The second way (which I can't find so far) is an existent tool/function or parser (in any language) which returns (hopefully) the plain text of the ePub so I can collect the first X words in order to create my excerpt.
Do you know about any tool which can help me achieve the second option?
You should have a look at Apache Tika: http://tika.apache.org/
You can use it from command line, or as a java library or even in server mode to extract text from ePub.
Hope this will help,
F.
Jose,
I'm not aware of any tool to do what you want. Let me comment on your first approach, though. If you do find a tool I hope these comments allow you to evaluate it.
I think your approach is fine and, if you want to do a good job of creating an extract, you may want to own this step anyway. I would suggest you,
grab the OPF file and look for a GUIDE section. If a GUIDE section exists, check the types that are given. Some are probably not relevant for an excerpt (cover,title-page,copyright-page). Many books will not have the types explicitly stated but this should help where they do.
now go through the files in sequence in the SPINE section, excluding anything that is irrelevant, and read through enough XHTML files to get your excerpt.
while in the OPF file grab a bunch of metadata if this is relevant for the excerpt (title, creator, date are mandatory, I think, and some authors will also put in a whole bunch of other metadata such as keywords).
If you are creating a mini-EPUB with this excerpt you will need to pick up any CSS, Audio, Video, Image and Custom Font files that get referenced in the XHTML files used to make your excerpt. You may even choose to use the original cover file for the cover file of your excerpt epub.
If you working with fixed layout books with fun stuff like Read Aloud AND you want to create a mini-EPUB as an excerpt, you may be better off going with a page count rather than a word count. Don't forget to include any SMIL files into your excerpt and to make it look nice: (i) don't split a two page spread and (ii) make sure that the first page is an odd numbered page if odd in the original or even if even numbered in the original - to do this you may need to add a blank filler page (get the odd/even wrong and subsequent two page spreads won't be facing each other)
I hope that helps.
I have links to 500 Wikipedia / Wikimedia Wikis, Talk Pages and history pages in an excel document that I'd like to parse to determine things like how many of the Wikis mention "advert" or "promotional" in the Talk page, how long the average Wiki is, how frequent edits are, etc.
I've figured out how to write a Visual Basics User Defined Function that will get the full HTML. Is there a plugin or some other way to get the text - as it appears on-screen - between two tags or identifiers, so I can pull out the information I need?
I am a business professional with very limited coding experience in comparison to a professional developer. But if you can point me in the right direction and to some good tutorials, I can learn. I'd also be interested in just paying someone a bit of money on the side if someone can help.
You can use XML Parser and Regex to search for text in an HTML document.
To get text as seen on in the browser, write a function to delete all tags. Although, it may not always be accurate as CSS and Javascript can alter what is visible on the screen.
I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis and my university wants a one sided print. The printing and binding will be done by a professional print company. They only accept two sided manuscripts.
Because of that I need to add a blank page after every page of content. I don't want to do this manually using \newpage or \clearpage because there are too many pages. Is there any, maybe low level, TeX command or package to do this? Or can you suggest another tool that does this without breaking the PDF?
Thanks for your help!
One option you might look into is to use a double sided layout that allows separate formatting for the even vs. odd pages: e.g. the book class allows this. Then you will need to define the even pages to be blank (presumably you don't want headers printed, or the page count to increment).
An alternative (if you can't get this to look correct for what you need) would be to do the layout in single sided (so that page numbering, etc. is all taken care of), then have a separate latex document which includes the pages, one at a time (pdfpages may be a good package to do this properly), and then insert blank pages (with no headers/etc.) in-between. This may end up being more work, but if you have trouble with formatting, it may be the easier way to go.
I suspect that you'd be better off doing this by manipulating the output PDF, rather than changing the LaTeX.
For example, if you're able to print to a file on your platform, there might be options in the print dialogue to tweak this. Your PDF viewer may be able to arrange this, if only by inserting blanks every second page. Or there may be a GUI or command-line tool to do the reshuffling for you.
Having said that, I've no specific recommendations for what tool you could use. A quick look around suggests strongly that the pstops tool might be able to do something along these lines, but that only helps if you're generating your PDF from postscript.
So no recipe, I'm afraid, but this'll probably be a better direction to look.
(or, meta answer: find a different print shop, or phone again and hope you get someone who gives you a different answer!)
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/acm-queue-ie.pdf
I want to write a document that has the style like this one.
Like having a light colored background on a page, having a big header (like the EXTRACTION) shown in this link. Do you think it is possible to something like this in Latex?
I am comfortable with doing normal things in latex.
If you download and look at the document properties, it was made with InDesign CS3. Could you do this in LaTeX? Yes. The cover page is... just a cover page. If you use fancyhdr and make a page header, you can increase the header height, then lay the page header in there as an image. Try eso-pic for page backgrounds. But in all honesty, that document is kind of ugly. :D
Your best bet for a document like this is to use a desktop publishing system. A Free/Open Source Software solution would be Scribus Desktop Publishing.
Off the top of my head:
-- check out ConTeXt, strictly speaking an alternative to LaTeX but one designed for something closer to DTP than LaTeX itself;
-- LaTeX has lots of facilities for DTP-like work, a good place to start would be the newsletter on link text
-- investigate packages such as PGF/TKZ, eso-pic, newspaper.
That document smell like made with InDesign or QuarkXPress ... I guess there is a way to do it in latex but will not be straightforward at all ...
Actually it's quite feasible using LaTeX, it's just a pity that the learning curve and the technical involvement are higher than when using DTP tools like Adobe InDesign.
This explains why few people are willing to involve the required amount of time and energy into mastering LaTeX for such kind of projects, and consequently why few introductory material is available on the subject.
One notable exception is the recent workshop given by Dominik Wagenführ at Ubucon 2009 in Göttingen. Its proceedings are freely available a the bottom of the page, as well as the related source code. It's all in German but fairly easy to understand and very educational, so I'd recommand you to study it.
I want to use LaTex to write equations faster and if it is possible to export the result as a png or jpg so that it can be used on a website.
Wikipedia (and its opensource wiki engine) uses LaTeX for that, maybe there are some resources available (at least in the code, as it is opensource).
Your question is very broad. You could start with Amazon's List of Latex Books.
You might want to investigate the StackExchange site mathoverflow.net solution - you can read about here. It uses jsMath which supports a lot of LaTeX syntax.
Assuming you already know a little LateX and your primary goal is to get images, a good high-level tool is mathTeX; there are even public servers that will convert to images for you.
If you want to do everything yourself, all the tools use dvipng at bottom.
I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output. See also this question.
try this: http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png
Here is a small symbol reference for LaTeX. If you are looking for something more as a general introduction, you can look at "The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e". If you use Inkscape, there is built in support for rendering LaTeX and there are also extensions that do the same. You can read some commentary about it here. There are also things like LaTeX to HTML converters; However, at the time I was looking at them, they were somewhat limited in what formulas they could display.
I taught myself LaTeX using the wikibook. It's fairly comprehensive as an initial guide. I've since bought The LaTeX Companion, which is a more advanced guide to in depth typesetting in LaTeX
I use http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_TeXer.php when I need a quick equation for a web site.
There are packages that will automatically produce images from LaTeX source, but these are often either buggy or used incorrectly. Many people install them on their blogs, for example, and the images show up if you visit the blog directly but they don't show up if you view the page via a blog reader. I'm not saying these problems can't be fixed. They can, but it often takes a few tries.
I prefer just to make a gif and stick it in the page. It's low tech and reliable.
One more tip: it's a good idea to put the LaTeX source in the alt tag of the image. This helps people using screen readers. It helps you too if you need to modify the equation later.
Detextify is a great site that lets you draw a symbol, and it will pop up a list of latex commands that may match your drawing. It's quite accurate! http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html