wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Category: e-books

  • O’Reilly Media book: EPUB 3 Best Practices

    The new EPUB 3 specification from the IDPF incorporates a wide range of technologies and functionality that are set to revolutionize electronic publishing. The format is poised to make the static two-dimensional page a thing of the past, introducing the world to new rich multimedia reading experiences and scripted interactivity. But a specification that offers so much can be a daunting thing to learn.

    EPUB 3 Best Practices steps in to help fill the knowledge void. Authored by people involved in the development of the specification, and with extensive experience in electronic publishing, this guide will provide you with a solid foundation on which to begin developing your own EPUBs. Topics covered include:

    A comprehensive survey of accessible production features and best practices A walkthrough of the new global language support features An introduction to the new multimedia elements and how to use them to embed content A guide to best practices for authoring of interactive elements and scripting A review of publication and distribution metadata Techniques for fixed and adaptive layouts

    EPUB 3 Best Practices is a must-read for anyone looking to unleash the potential of the new format.

  • where does the “soft Kindle” store its files? (actually: ***kindle2epub*** in 2014)

    • $ cd $HOME && find . -iname ‘*kindle*content*’
    • $HOME/Documents/eBookConverter/Kindle DRM Removal/
    • $HOME/Calibre Library/ – calibre leave its conversion outputs here

  • another “Kindle DRM removal” software by epubsoft

  • “Kindle DRM Removal” – remove Kindle ebook DRM protection

    • http://www.ebook-converter.com/kindle-drm-removal.htm
    • allows some free runs
    • will cost me less than EUR 30
    • does an incredible job
    • running calibre afterwards allows me to convert the document to “epub e-book”
    • then I am able  to “socially read” the book using iBooks on the Mac

  • the 11 e-books I got today from O’Reilly

    Downloaded through Dropbox to my Synology ^NAS:

    • oreilly–Agile_Data_Science.20131011104838.pdf
    • oreilly–Building_Web_Apps_with_WordPress.20140407142920.pdf
    • oreilly–Communicating_Data_with_Tableau.20140612124036.pdf
    • oreilly–Data_Science_at_the_Command_Line.20140626143621.pdf
    • oreilly–Free_as_in_Freedom.20130104090715.pdf
    • oreilly–Graph_Databases.20130612085254.pdf
    • oreilly–IPv6_Address_Planning.20140528100600.pdf
    • oreilly–IPv6_Essentials–3rd_Edition.20140605124939.pdf
    • oreilly–MySQL–Cookbook–2nd_Edition.20130114120323.pdf
    • oreilly–Python–Cookbook–3rd_Edition.20140306152041.pdf
    • oreilly–WordPress__The_Missing_Manual–2nd_Edition.20140617133938.pdf

  • book: PDF Explained

  • how to print a PDF document together with its filename in its upper left corner?

    This is only a very special case of “how to add text given on the command line to a PDF file?“

    If I don’t find a nice and read utility to do this,

    • I will create an image file from the PDF file,
    • I will create another image file from that text string (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?),
    • and I will finally overlay them (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?).
    PDF Hacks‘ Hack# 90 describes how to “Superimpose PDF Pages“; there is also a one-liner with pdftk for that:
    $ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.marked.pdf background watermark.pdf
     
    I need to print like 200 rather similar (1-page) files, which look rather, rather similar, and I don’t want to guess the filename from the contents of the page, so I prefer to print the filename on the same page as the actual contents.

     

    Update 2011-07-04:
    I am using text2pdf (a rather, rather simple tool) for this task (regard this as one logical line):

    $ echo “text to be printed into the upper left corner” | /usr/local/text2pdf/text2pdf -A4 -s10 -v12 | pdftk original_file output file_with_sth_in_its_upper_left_corner background –

  • pdftk – The PDF Toolkit

    Superimpose Pages with pdftk

    pdftk packs iText’s power into a standalone program. Apply a single PDF page to the background of an entire document like so:

    pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.marked.pdf background watermark.pdf

    pdftk will use the first page of watermark.pdf, if it has more than one page. You can combine this background option with additional input operations (such as assembling PDFs [Hack#51]) and other output options (such as encryption [Hack #52]).

  • xpdf: Error (…): Missing ‘endstream’

    There are a few PDF documents around here, that I can read with Acrobat Reader w/o problems, but xpdf and its companions moan. I guess, that’s because they got modified and a little destroyed using Acrobat X Pro.

    I used pdftk to get rid of that problem: first output/uncompress, than output/compress again:

    $ pdftk x.pdf output
        x.uncompressed.pdf uncompress
    $ pdftk x.uncompressed.pdf output
        x.recompressed.pdf compress

  • how to burst a PDF document into single pages (etc.)

    This command line shows, how to get the output files named your way:

    $ pdftk … burst output ‘page.%02d.pdf’

    Split Select Pages from Multiple PDFs into a New Document:

    $ pdftk A=one.pdf B=two.pdf cat A1-7 B1-5 A8 output combined.pdf

    Select a single page (#130) into a new document:
    $ pdftk A=one.pdf cat A130 output one.p130.pdf
    Extract pages 10 through 11 to y.pdf :
     
    $ pdftk x.pdf cat 10-11 output y.pdf

    Please find more information (like examples, man page, …) on pdftk through the link above!