moose's fanfic toys

I'm working on a crude little php page that'll convert text into pdf documents. So far I plan for the following:

• Automatic cover page generation
• Automatic file properties set accordingly
• Headers with author and title, and footer with page numbers
• Page breaks at the end of each chapter
• Ability to set number of chapters and enter all of them on one page
• Automatic replacement of 'fancy' quote marks with simple ones*

Is there anything else that people would like to see? Font size/face options perhaps? Maybe paper size too? Just reply here or drop me a PM.

If anyone has any other ideas for projects for me to work on, I'd love to hear them. I will look into a mass PM sender once we've moved, but not before as I know it won't work now.



*This isn't a special feature really, it just won't work otherwise.

Oh, fun. Font and font size is good as some (me!) have old eyes and have to use reading glasses or take off the contacts (which is no good for work or driving since I'm not even sure there's a big E on the chart with one eye).

Hmm, if I think of anything, I'll edit.

I'd like to be able to tweak font. Maybe if you standardize it to the options from Microsoft Word?

Valairy_Scot: wouldn't zooming in work as well? I totally understand where you're coming from, I'm just not sure it would be a good idea to go beyond maybe 14pt or 16pt at most. An A4 file zoomed to fit width is pretty big on a 17" monitor.

DarthIshtar: there are a million different fonts, maybe you could suggest a few? I'm thinking Calibri, Times New Roman, Cambria, Garamond, Lucida Bright, and Lucida Console, with TNR being default.

Arial, Comic Sans and Nyala are my favorites.

*barfs everywhere for an uncomfortably long time*

Well, I don't like your color scheme. What do you use, Helvetica?

Wingdings, my dear. Nothing but Wingdings.



Seriously though, I might just have to try this thing once you're finished with it, moosemousse. Sounds like a cool project.


*obligatory type nerd note: Arial, which you said you like, is Helvetica, just... worse. It's the "Great Value" to Helvetica's brand name. Sometimes it matters, sometimes not. Fanfic pdfs would be a case of "not." Whoever decapitated that lowercase t should be punished to the full extent of the law though.

Well, I don't usually zoom in PDFs but I don't see why not. On my 19" at home monitor I open Word in 14pt Times New Roman magnified roughly 140%. AT work, 100% - but then a different size/resolution.

I don't zoom the boards, though, either place.

It sounds like an interesting project, and excuse me for being totally dense, but what's the purpose?

Valairy_Scot: It'll definitely do 14pt so if that's big enough then great.

Lilith Demodae: There are three reasons really. The first is that I'd like to read some of my own fanfics on an ereader and there are other fanfics by other people that I'd like to be able to do the same with. Having a handy tool to convert text to pdf just seems like an easy way of doing it as it might not be easy for everyone to convert files into pdfs on their own machine. The second reason is that I'm unemployed and I live in the middle of nowhere so it's something fun for me to do to help pass the time and it's something that I'm enjoying a lot too. The third reason is that it'd look great on my CV as an example of web dev work that I can do. It's all well and good for me to say that I can do things but proving it so much better.

hah, I lied. I use 12 pt Times New Roman, but you know, in 14pt I don't "have" to magnify.

Openoffice.org (free) supposedly converts .doc and I suppose .docx to .pdf and I was thinking of testing that out for almost the exact same reasons (only laptop at this time, not ereader).

Does a pdf size the same or smaller than Word? Interestingly enough, .docx is smaller than .doc.

Ah. That's a lovely idea. Thanks for the explanation. Somedays I'm more blond than others.