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I have been reading and enjoying the stories on this site for a little over 2 months now. I have been saving the PDF formats to a stick drive to read at work since this site is blocked and it is the only time I have to read them. Now when I come back from vacation, there is no more PDF available. What is the reason for this? I am disappointed.
Sadly, it's broken!
Hi Dalliea
See Erin's Blog Entry. Hopefully it will be back when Erin upgrades BCTS.
PDF Stuffed
Bike Resources
Bike Resources
PDFs or docs
...to read at work since this site is blocked and it is the only time I have to read them.
Ahh, a soul mate, and I like your honesty.
You can just grab the stories -- I just highlight, rather than use ctrlA because you don't get the sidebars that way -- then save in your word possessor. Might be better than PDFs but I'm not techsavvy to be certain. You can even put them into an email that way and use google's or someone storage instead of a stick
Print Friendly
Use the Print Friendly link to eliminate sidebars and most of the header and footer. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
PDF's
Most modern word processors* have the ability to create PDF's. OpenOffice is a free one, if yours won't, and is available on most platforms. There's an advantage in creating your documents in a word processor that can generate PDF's, because you're halfway to publishing if you ever want to do that. If you want to go to print formats, you'll have to re-size the pages to fit the standards of the print publisher, but this is relatively trivial.
Here are the standard US sizes:
In reality, though, the smaller trade paperback format, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2"**, is the only size that can be printed in quantities under 1000 books without costing a large premium at most small presses. This is why Lulu and other small press books, which are often POD (Print On Demand) titles, are almost always "trade" paperbacks.
European (and world) paper sizes are based on different measurement and cutting standards, so many European (and world) publishers have different standards for their "default" book size, although the British book sizes are different than European sizes for historical reasons, and are used throughout the English-speaking world, except in the USA.
In general, a "World-sized" letter-sized sheet of paper is called an "A4" sheet, a little narrower and a little taller than the US equivalent.
The preferred format for Kindle publishing, on the other hand, is HTML, although the large Kindles can show a PDF at a reasonable size without scrolling. PDF's are designed to create exact page images, which means they don't reformat themselves the way HTML pages do. Some word processors can create HTML, but many do a very poor job of it. In general, creating a Kindle book requires either specialised software or detailed knowledge of HTML and XML (for the Table of Contents and any included graphics), plus a bit of special stuff, since the format is eventually compressed according to a specific standard, basically "MobiPocket," now owned by Amazon. Most of this can be done through the Amazon.com self-publishing interface, which is offered gratis by Amazon on their web site.
Cheers,
Puddin'
* Microsoft Word, for example, has this option available from the "Print" dialogue box.
OpenOffice allows one to "Export file as PDF" from the "File" menu.
** You'll notice that this is exactly half the size of a standard US "letter-sized" 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper, so if one prints double pages double-sided, one can create the pages for a book with one slice, and every slice costs money. This usually requires special software, because the pages have to be especially rearranged and formatted in order for printing, making the center margins wider, for example, but other manipulations may be needed. Since many books have a table of contents, all this has to be arranged, and it can be a fiddly task without software designed to do the work. Professionals use publishing software like Adobe InDesign, QuarkXpress, Adobe PageMaker, or other specialty packages. They tend to be pricey.
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
eBook tool
Here's a link to another free tool for eBooks that works on multiple platforms.
Calibre
Calibre can open and write to most eBook formats and tweak output for various special purposes. It's what I use to prepare the files that go into the Hatbox.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Paper sizes.
In case US readers think things like A4 has very odd dimensions as Puddin' mentions, there really is a logical explanation. Those ISO paper sizes go down from A0 and their unique quality is that folding/cutting each in half results in the next smaller size - eg A5 is exactly half A4 in area. The funny linear dimensions come about because of the unavoidable geometry and the intrusion of squrt 2 - work it our with a little trig or look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size
As to saving stories conveniently I usually go to the printable option, as Erin says, and do a cntrl A cntrl C and save it in a Word document, sometimes doing a bit of trimming before the save. I have a huge library of saved stories on my HD (and mostly backed up) for my personal use and I've found this the best way so far. Interestingly I've been able to reunite at least one writer with her own lost work so it's not an entirely selfish back-up.
Robi
Formats to Save As
Although I can convert to/from PDF, I usually prefer to save files either as RTF (if I'm writing, so want to preserve any formatting), or as plain text files (if I'm just reading). A PDF file is never going to match the shape and size of whatever I am viewing it on. PDFs are useful only if one is going to actually print the file, in which case it does exactly what is intended.
HTML is a useful intermediate format in that it preserves text formatting while not insisting on a page layout - assuming that the web page is properly constructed, of course - but can make the file bloated if one's not careful.
Most of the files I read when I'm not on-line are therefore plain text. This has the slight disadvantage that I'm missing italics and bold, but I can usually live with that.
Penny
HTML
Not nearly so bloated as most word processing files. Corel WordPerfect uses html-like tags, so is pretty much the same size as html files, but MSWord uses internal tables and pointers to specific locations within the file, which can cause severe bloating (and sometimes corruption) as the file is edited.
HTML generated from Word is extremely bloated, since their algorithm goes to extreme lengths to make the HTML look just like the Word display, but clean HTML is really minimal, and can usually be limited to a few extra characters per paragraph.
Open Office is cleaner (and I think better) and most of the features work easily and reliably, unlike Word, which carries the burden of a lot of past failures, which the current code has to maintain for "compatibility." Open Office file sizes are usually smaller than Word files as well. What's not to like?
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Yup.
Don't use that obscure OS from Redmond -- it's Linux + OpenOffice all the way :)
Penny
one quick word of advice on Save As PDF in Word
this is an add-in for Word 2007, although lots of free ones work for other (older and different versions of OS/Document editor) software combos. The 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF is here
Hugs'
Diana
PDF converting
There's an excellent little tool for this called CutePDF Writer (http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp) that installs itself as a printer in Windows. Thus you use the normal print functionality of any program able to print to generate a PDF of the document in question. Just don't use it with Safari, because the other browsers make text-PDFs, but Safari renders everything to image format and that makes for HUGE image-PDF files that do graphically look really nice, but are just way too large on disk.