Hi,
I’m trying to make a teachers’ manual to go alongside a Bloom book. To do this, at the moment I need to either (a) create images of the pages of the Bloom book (my husband has told me the incantation for ghostscript to do this) and insert them into the teacher’s book or (b) duplicate the book and insert a lot of extra pages. In both cases it seems it would be easy for the teachers’ book and the students’ book to become out of sync. (I’m still at the trial publication stage, so things change frequently.) Would it be possible for Bloom to automatically pull pages from another book in the collection (or even another collection) as an automatically updating image/iframe so that getting out of sync doesn’t happen?
Ideally (since I’m working in multiple dialects) this new feature would have an easily changeable “source book” so that I can just copy the teachers’ book into another collection and change the source book to the right dialect version and only need to make a few changes to match the dialect.
Thank you,
Sari
Would it work to maintain just one book, the one with both the regular content and the teachers’ manual pages, and then have some way to hide the teachers’ manual pages during publishing? Or possibly a way to generate a book without those pages which you would only keep long enough to print or otherwise publish it, while doing all the editing in the full version? Even without modifying Bloom, it would not be very hard to make a little program that would take a book and strip out all the pages that were made from a particular template page.
Then of course you could translate the whole thing into another language as usual, and again make a cut-down version without the teacher pages for students.
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can open the pupil book PDF and export all the pages as graphics of the appropriate resolution to insert into your teacher’s guide.
That doesn’t solve the problem of what happens when you update the pupil book, though…
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can open the pupil book PDF and export
all the pages as graphics of the appropriate resolution to insert into your
teacher’s guide.
For those who don’t have Acrobat Professional, ye olde command line soloution
(needs ghostscript) has been something like this for the last 20+years:
Other graphics formats are of course available. -r sets the pixels/inch.
That doesn’t solve the problem of what happens when you update the pupil book,
though…
One solution, I think, would be to have the images in Bloom’s directory
auto-updated (based on timestamps, maybe, like make?), or maybe with an excel-like
‘this book contains images from an external document, do you want to update them?’
Would it work to maintain just one book, the one with both the regular
content and the teachers’ manual pages, and then have some way to hide the
teachers’ manual pages during publishing?
Thank you, that’s a good idea, except I simplified the situation in that I
actually have two languages for the teachers. For this to work I would
need to make sure that the instructions are bilingual and doing that I’d
need to have really tiny print, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that.
We’ll prototype it using page images as insets and see what we end up
with.
The books are already about 40 pages long, and doubling that with the
teachers’ pages would probably make it too long for our stapler or Bloom,
at least on our computer.
Thank you.
Interesting. So you want a page of teachers instructions for every page in the student book, with a miniature of the student page on it somewhere? It would be interesting to see some examples of what you’d like it to look like.
What if we made it one of the options for inserting an image to insert a miniature of a page from another book, and then had a command somewhere to update all the miniatures to the current version of that page? Or just did that automatically whenever you open the teachers’ book for editing? (Not promising we can do this…just exploring options…). You could then use current tools to lay out the rest of the teachers’ manual page however you want.
(There are slight differences in the spelling, becaus of dialect differences, but you should get the idea.)
My husband tells me to paste in the makefile below. It works quite well. The only problem is when Bloom reimports the picture and chooses a different name. I end up with lots of duplicates, only one of which is the updated version. It would be nice if Bloom didn’t mind replacing an image with the same book (or using the same picture in the same book without creating a new copy).
uptodate: ~/temp/É\ dujto\ könyve-LivezeniPages.pdf
ghostscript -r100x100 -sDEVICE=jpeg -sOutputFile=/home/sari/temp/e2konve-livezeni-%d.jpg -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH ~/temp/‘É dujto könyve-LivezeniPages.pdf’
mogrify -trim /home/sari/temp/e2konve-livezeni-.jpg
for A in e2konve-livezeni-.jpg ; do cp /home/sari/temp/$$A . ; done
What if we made it one of the options for inserting an image to insert a miniature of a page from another book, and then had a command somewhere to update all the miniatures to the current version of that page? Or just did that automatically whenever you open the teachers’ book for editing? (Not promising we can do this…just exploring options…). You could then use current tools to lay out the rest of the teachers’ manual page however you want.
Yes, this would be great, especially if (as above) there’s the option to remove the white space (autocrop) the pages. (That should probably be optional, because someone might want the margin there, but I don’t. The writing’s small enough already.)
I don’t have time to try that right now, but if the ghostscript process can be made to produce page images with the same names each time (overwriting any earlier version) and you copy them into Bloom’s book folder Bloom should just use the latest ones in the teacher manual. You might need to quit and restart Bloom to defeat any caching of the old images.
Bloom should just use the latest ones in the teacher manual.
Yes, ghostscript is reusing filenames (overwriting files),
the copy portion of the script is overwriting the files in the Bloom Dir. This
works well for 90% of the images. The
remaining ‘issue’ is that when Bloom gets told to use an image twice (or for
some reason the user deletes then re-imports the image) Bloom it is making
duplicate copies with a new name, e.g. a 2nd copy of page2.jpg is saved as
page21.jpg. This obviously breaks the originalFilename-to-copyFilename
correspondence. (and a certain amount of chaos ensues if there’s a page21.jpeg
that the user wants to insert later).