Getting individual pages from magazines - remix?

[bensimmo]

Not sure how best to title it.

Where do I go to get the parts to remix the MagPi and HackSpace, scanning or printing the pages out and then scanning them in seems a lot of faff and looses quality and the active links.

I subscribe to both for hard copies.

What I want to do is combine the tutorials (C, Games, Electronics etc) all the useful stuff and combine for easy access to my kids and also for school and PiJam use if any more advance people come along

thanks.

[salvato]

Why not to print in a pdf file the pages you are interested in (from the pdf version of the magazine) and then concatenate the various files into a single pdf ?

[bensimmo]

Doing it from the source would be easier as I could edit page numbers, alter bits not needed or add bits needed and errata edits and such like, as needed.

I have looked in the github and the old (long time back) have the stuff on there, but none of the new stuff. It's just a few python code files now.

Unless anyone knows a program (free windows preferably) that can pull a pdf apart and back into and publishing/design format.

[salvato]

PDFCreator ?

[bensimmo]

I just did a test print method and all links and ability to text and copy code out of it has gone.
That's the only method I have of printing it (pdf print in Windows10)

If anyone works/worked in a school, they'll know how difficult it will be to get anything else on the computer.

[bensimmo]

I'll await a Raspberry Pi Foundation info, it should be somewhere as that part of the open source mantra I thought.
I'm probably just looking in the wrong place.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/about-us/

It'll be easier to know which route to go to get new images/software install on the computer(s).

[fruitoftheloom]

I'll await a Raspberry Pi Foundation info, it should be somewhere as that part of the open source mantra I thought.
I'm probably just looking in the wrong place.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/about-us/

It'll be easier to know which route to go to get new images/software install on the computer(s).

RPF use GitHub:

https://github.com/themagpimag

[bensimmo]

But they unfortunately don't for MagPi (or HackSpace?) anymore other than for a bit of python code.
(See third post in this topic)

[stubright]

I'm not sure what OS you're using but in Mint, and more than likely other Linux distros, pdfshuffler can split/re-arrange/add pages, it can also concatenate files. Inkscape can edit pdfs one page at a time.
So you can export each page you want in pdfshuffler, edit the pages in inkscape and save as a pdf then stitch them back together in pdfshuffler, while maintaining selectable text etc.
Inkscape will open pdfs directly but the open dialogue box is a little sluggish with large documents on a desktop PC.
Disclaimer: - I haven't tried any of this in depth and I don't think I'd use any of it on a PI (I didn't try it on my PIs, so YMMV).

Stu

[robthez]

We don't make the IDDs available as the PDFs hold all the info anyway. You can grab the images and text and such from the PDFs, although I don't know any free software off the top of my head that can remake them in a way you'd like - sorry!

[bensimmo]

Oh well, old fashioned way it is then.
Photo copied handouts stapled together
Ok may get a bit more techy than that if I can combine the pdf (something for a rainy weekend at home, I'll look at some of the ideas above )

Sort of goes against the 'open source' ideology you promote though, since the source is not available. (Hence why I asked here, as I assumed it would be somewhere).
You may want to change your commitment statement.

We open source
The MagPi magazine is committed to open source and operates under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). This means you are welcome to share and adapt the content of the magazine as long as you follow the licence terms.

Anyway, keep the good articles.coming

[lucyhattersley]

The InDesign documents don't always contain the final information. And we could update the PDF after it goes on sale, for a variety of reasons (safety, technical, legal etc).

We're open to the conversation, but you can extract the text and images from the PDF and they are available under the creative commons license. So I feel it's unfair to criticise our commitment to open source.

I'm wary of sharing pre-production material for legitimate reasons (looks at issue 67).

[procount]

Unless anyone knows a program (free windows preferably) that can pull a pdf apart and back into and publishing/design format.

To split and merge PDF files on Windows for free, you could use PDFSAM https://pdfsam.org/

[bensimmo]

The InDesign documents don't always contain the final information. And we could update the PDF after it goes on sale, for a variety of reasons (safety, technical, legal etc).

We're open to the conversation, but you can extract the text and images from the PDF and they are available under the creative commons license. So I feel it's unfair to criticise our commitment to open source.

I'm wary of sharing pre-production material for legitimate reasons (looks at issue 67).

My point was the 'source' isn't there, the product is and while it can be cut and pasted and is more open then some locked down pdf, it's still not the source.
Open Source is not the same as the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

I'm in no way trying to take away money ideas, (e.g. people chopping out adverts and reselling as their own work, which is against the license anyway).
and the old 'mains lamp' problem isn't a problem as the source can be changed as you already do.

Perhaps release the source after a few months when the magazine is no longer a money revenue?

I don't know if you've tried to extract text, but with a copy and paste, all your nice formatting goes, code listing become a mess (all the line numbers are listed first, colour is lost, and there are no line breaks)
And what would be, take a few pages and compile them together for teaching after a short learning session (or someone doing it and placing them up in the Teaching and Learning section), then become a Desktop Publish CPD and part time job.


I know it sound like I'm moaning about something that is free anyway, but it's just to help clubs/school have an easier way of using your magazines and they are excellent articles, not all make it to the blog/tutorial of the MagPi site (which is easier to compile from, but not a magaziney)

[lucyhattersley]

PDF Miner is worth looking at as well

https://pypi.org/project/pdfminer/

PDF Miner is a MIT / OSI license. I think it's worth pointing out that InDesign documents aren't open source at all (a personal bugbear of mine) and InDesign isn't a cheap program either.

[bensimmo]

Oddly one the few programmes I think we have here is the Adobe suite, probably some education license thing they need just to use photoshop or premiere. I know not all places will though.

So far on psts above, every site has been blocked
your python one hasn't, now if only we had python on these computers.

Education, the place where you are told to use the world and push technology usage, except you are not actually allowed to use it or try things out as they don't trust anyone

For now I can split and combine individual pages (I think) and then staple on a sheet with links for the lazy ones to download the code.


As an idea, once a series has finished, MagPi (and the others possibly) could bring out a short booklet with just the series in ?
Like the big Essentials books, or the smaller Make Games, but just that specific series.

As a side, you could have a chat with other parts of the Foundation and get the series/articles moved into the https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/ under MagPi Articles ?

[DougieLawson]

Education, the place where you are told to use the world and push technology usage, except you are not actually allowed to use it or try things out as they don't trust anyone

Do they let you use Google Translate?

My youngest in learned in year 11 (three years ago) to use Google Translate (ask Dr. Google to translate "from English to English") as an open and free transparent proxy.

[bensimmo]

No, they shut that one down years ago.

[ConfuSomu]

I checked and the webpage translation 'proxy' service is still up! You would think that they would shut it down as Google Chrome can now translate pages (Google pushing the Chrome monopoly). It seems that you cannot translate the webpage from its original language (e.g English or Detect Language) to the same language (e.g English). You need to select the "original" view. This view does not bypass the proxy, as it can be seen in iframe's source.

[hippy]

I checked and the webpage translation 'proxy' service is still up! You would think that they would shut it down as Google Chrome can now translate pages (Google pushing the Chrome monopoly).

Perhaps that's evidence that Google aren't pushing the Chrome monopoly.

[scruss]

pdfseparate / pdfunite from the poppler-utils package will do the job and keep the links intact. The syntax is a bit limited, only allowing first and last page ranges. I run 'em on both a Raspberry Pi and under WSL on Windows.

[gkaiseril]

Using a Raspberry Pi, I would install Off to to extract the pages an recombine them as needed from the freely downloadable PDF of the issue in question. One could also use A PC or Mac and a PDF of the magazine and any of the PDF editors/creators to edit it.