Newsletter / Lá thư Làng Mai

Single source publishing project using Eleventy and PagedJS.

A deploy is running here: lathu.langmai.org

Setup for local development

The media archive (5.5GiB) is required but not part of this repository. Please request it from the Newsletter team and extract it via: tar -xf LTLM_2024_2023_and_2022_Media_Archive.tar

Then run ./setup.sh

Run npm start and browse to http://localhost:8080/.

Generating PDF files

node generatePDF.js

Deployment

npm run deploy

Useful resources

• PagedJS documentation & quick solution & fix to layout problems

• Designing For Print With CSS - Rachel Andrew in Smashing Magazine

• print-css.rocks

• PrintCSS

• Book toolkit

• Une chaîne de publication collaborative et multisupport pour le musée Saint-Raymond (French article that describes a similar workflow. Very readable with Google translate. Source code available.)

• Multilingual sites with Eleventy

• Conversion to Markdown with GroupDocs

Other tools considered

• Prince
• Vivliostyle
• Quire
• html2print
• A comparison of different html2pdf tools

Bugs & ToDos

• Eleventy Image processing is not parallel.
• Sometimes paragraphs (and images) do not break correctly to the next page. See src/media/documentation/BugTextFragment.webp. The fragment ends up in the top right corner (or outside) of the page.
• The pages with the fade-in gradients over the background images crash Adobe Reader, but only if they had been compressed before with Ghostscript; the uncompressed original works fine! In other words, there is something Ghostscript adds in the compression of those pages that cause the crash. I confirmed that it does not depend on the number of stops of the linear-gradient. It also does not depend on the whether or not I use PDF version 1.7 or 1.5.

Bulk conversation from source ODT (or DOCX...) to Markdown using Pandoc

for i in *.odt
do
	pandoc --from odt --to markdown --wrap=none -i "$i" -o "${i%odt}md"
done

Text Harmonisations to Remember/Conventions

VS Code allows for regex replace submatch, e.g.: ([a-zA-Z])" > $1”

• Sr > Sr.
• Br > Br.

• (replace double spaces)

• –

• ... > …
• ... > …
• ' > ’
• ' > ’ (a pandoc markdown conversion thing)
• " > “”
• "([\p{Letter}]) > “$1
• ”. > .”
• **(.*)** > ## $1
• file:///media/data/dev/newsletter/src/media/originals/(.*) > {% image "$1" %}

Terminal Foo

/media/data/dev/newsletter/src/media/originals/article2024 find * | grep -i "Done" | grep -E -i "jpg|jpeg|png" | grep -v "/." find -iname ".*" -delete find -iname ".DS_Store" -delete