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Web to chip-paper, again

Litro (via Pond) is gorgeous. Straplined as ‘original fiction for the underground’, you print off the two page PDF, slap them back to back, fold them in half and voila, a little book for the tube, bus or bog.

I know we’re supposed to be going paper free but the concept is just so damn appealing. I haven’t given up on the idea of producing something similar from blogs. But without having to re-learn Quark or similar, and devote a chunk of time to manually laying the thing out each week, I’m not sure how to do it.

Ideally it should be an automated process but as far as I can see the technology is lagging behind. (A cascading style sheet convention for fluid text, for example, which would allow newspaper column style web-based layouts, is lacking.) The thing seems tantalisingly just out of reach – the Wordpress printable page, say, nicely formatted and PDFed shouldn’t be that hard.

HP Blog Printing goes some way towards it for individual blogs (click on ‘printable version’ at the top of this page for a taster) but the results from the printer are aesthetically disappointing A4 tranches (reading anything off A4 is crap) that come nowhere near the very haveable little pamphlets that Litro produces.


Posted on September 14th, 2007 at 11:03am under Blog, bloggers and blogging, Webjunk

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• 4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Devil's Kitchen (32 comments.) on 17.09.2007 at 01:15 Permalink | Reply

    Well, you could use an InDesign template, with standard styles. It wouldn’t take any time at all.

    I’m happy to give it a shot if you like. You select the blogs and that I can shove them into InDesign, PDF is and then upload them again.

    Drop me a line if you want to give it a shot…

    DK

  2. Justin on 17.09.2007 at 11:10 Permalink | Reply

    Cheers, DK. I’m tinkering with a few bits and pieces but might very well give you a shout.

  3. Devil's Kitchen (32 comments.) on 17.09.2007 at 19:01 Permalink | Reply

    Nae bother. I have the skill and the software.

    DK

    P.S. Quark was always a crock of shit anyway…

  4. Justin on 17.09.2007 at 19:20 Permalink | Reply

    I always had a soft spot for Quark and, at least when I did my journo qualification, it is/was the newspaper industry standard.

    I’d still like to automate the bugger. Slam together a blog aggregator, a bit of PHP and this baby – Prince – and Bob’s your uncle. In theory.

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