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

[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.