PSA: ljbook.com

[da]

I was just playing around with ljbook.com and it's pretty neat. It's a free service that will convert your LJ to a PDF book.

My 98 entries plus 285 comments translated into 107 pages at 8.5x11 inches or 133 pages at 7.5x9.25 inches.

The quality is fair; better than I expected for free. The formatting is vanilla, but it's LaTeX [1]. There are things I'd like to fix, so I'll be contacting the service provider and asking whether he'd like help hacking on the code. The way it works is it logs into your LJ, and uses LJ's (API) tools to export your entries, your choice of what security levels, whether you include comments, etc. It then translates from HTML to LaTeX then to pdf. It took about two minutes to process my journal. I changed my password before and after, which actually took me longer to do than the actual book-creation process.

[1] They can also output the LaTeX code, which you can edit yourself. Unfortunately, they don't include photos in the LaTeX version. Whine, whine.

Comments

[dpolicar]

yeah, I was pleased with it too.
my primary "complaint" has to do with its bracketing -- the way it's set up, there's no way to dump the comments since a particular date (eg, the date I last printed my comments out as a book).

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Hm... excellent point, if you happen to have that problem. In my case, I don't think I've gotten more than a few comments on old posts, well after the post.

If it did post the comments, how would you want to interleave the comments with the existing pages? I'm curious, because I can think of a few ways, none which seem particularly elegent. The best I can think of seems to be re-publishing the entire year, then reprinting the pages representing the changed section.

Ooh, but they don't print months as new chapters, nor would the page-numbers match up, so you're pretty much stuck reprinting the whole thing.

I suppose you could print an Appendix with just the new comments, and references to where they should go.

[dpolicar]

Oh, sorry-- I mispoke. I meant to say "posts".
That is, I can't reprint since May 25 2pm, or whatever.
Your point about new comments on old posts is a good one too though. I'd probably want it in a separate section, like an appendix, as you say.
I'd also like a way of getting at all of my comments on others' posts, but that's a ubiquitous LJ limitation and LJbook is unlikely to address it.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. That's another limitation. :)

I'd also like a way of getting at all of my comments on others' posts, but that's a ubiquitous LJ limitation and LJbook is unlikely to address it.

Hm, well. I'd love something like that too (for my own comments, or even to track a friend's comments). An automatic "owning of my own comments", which goes further and incorporates the comments themselves. I doubt I'll have the TUITs to write it myself, but if I come across something like that, I'll try and pass it along.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

When you said "bracketing", I assumed it was going to be about its quoting style, with its malformed-LaTeX backwards right-double-quotes...

Some time ago, I learned how to fix those, but I don't remember any more. I'll ask my sweetie, who is much more of a LaTeX guy than I.