Topic awaiting preservation: Tech-Slop is on indefinita hiatus

My baby, Technical Slop, is off of the web.
Something went awry and Tech-Slop went down.
Everything is mostly fixed and I could have it back up in a few minutes, but I haven't gotten the urge just yet.

That's right, I currently have no urge to put Tech-Slop back online. I've been thinking about this for some time and it's because Tech-Slop has come full circle. When I first started Tech-Slop, I had an unknown personal goal. Well, I finally recognized that goal when I accomplished it.

In other words, Tech-Slop no longer serves me.

After a little more thinking, I do have a plan.
I will finish up the few tutorials running around in my head, and then put Tech-Slop back online.
After that, I'm not sure what will become of Tech-Slop. A myriad of things could happen, but I won't be adding to it anymore.

I'm sorry to hear you're letting it go. You've done a great job in explaining a not easy to understand feature of adobe photoshop.

^ Yup.

Well at least don't leave those tutorials dorment on your hard disk, upload em somewhere. (the FAQ even)

Thanks WJ, I enjoyed and appreciated your efforts. You will forever be the man that tore into PS with the upmost of detail.

well, can't blame you.
You did an excellent job, I loved reading tech-slop.
It be a shame to see it disappear forever.
So, if you were to want someone to throw the caretaking (ie. keeping it up somewhere) into someone's hands, I'm certain there would be plenty volunteers.
The faq would be a nice place for it though.
Or I could get you a dozen 'html' pages in the new asylum ;-)

so long,

Tyberius Prime

The Gurus Network would also be an ideal place to put much of it.

Yeah, mirrors. When the time comes and somebody does want to be a currator, I'm more than fine with that. I only ask two things: 1. Basic SSI for includes; 2. Close ties to the Asylum. I would like to keep it close to the Asylum mainly because this is where it all began, and most of you folks were there for various things. It would feel proper as some of you veterans are kind of like uncles or something.

Thanks, folks.

Hey WarJ UncleTao has always appreciated your efforts, so much so that you are quoted on my site (and I only have two quotations atm). And I know others have done the same.

:::tao:::

Be glad to help out, if I can.

wj:

quote:

---

When I first started Tech-Slop, I had an unknown personal goal. Well, I finally recognized that goal when I accomplished it.

In other words, Tech-Slop no longer serves me.

---

So its time for a book then eh?

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org

warjournal: Though I've discovered the TechSlop lately it is an undoubtly great ressource. I respect and understand your decision to take the time to relive it in good conditions. As other said before you could write a book of Photoshop techniques. I'll add that the TechSlop could easily become the companion website of that book

If you need hosting space, I have both space and bandwidth available.
I would be tickled to death to put it in a subdomain on my server.

I have spent a lot of time trying to grasp a lot of the concepts you explain and it would be a shame to see it disappear.

Email me privately and we can set something up.


Few problems in life can't be solved by chocolate

Ah, the print variable. I've been avoiding this topic, so thanks to Emps for that. :bleh:

When I first started Tech-Slop, the HTML wasn't good for anything other than for the web. I had made the wrong decision all those moons ago. When I started playing with making PDFs, I had to hand edited around 40 pages of suck. Took a week of serious midnight marathons.

So now I've got "raw" content in a table that is *much* easier to get into another program for PDF conversion. My weapon of choice being Word Perfect. I have tried a few others, but I like WP and it works far better than anything else I've tried.

Except... graphic conversions just plain sucks for gradients. Banded city on nearly every single graphic with a gradient, and you know how much I like gradients. File > Save for Web > Gif : no dithering, web safe. :blech:

Bite the bullet on the graphics and have PDFs done in a few weeks?
Sounds tempting, but I'm seriously stuck on having crappy images with crappy gradients. I mean, they are so integral to my stuff that I would hate to have them so crappy. Crap!

I'm open to suggestions on that.
Other software to try or a work-around in WP.
Hell, I might even try FrontPage.

Thanks for the offer, Rick, but I would like to see Tech-Slop possibly on the new Asylum somewhere, on GN somewhere, or in the hands of an Asylum veteran. I do appreciate your offer, though.

well... provided you have the pages and the images in a halfway 'readable' format, I have a php class that easily integrates any jpeg or most pngs you throw at it.
Full control over the pages layout as well. (meaning it has to be coded by hand).
But it is nice... just finished a project where it creates a 200+ pages product catalogue within less than a minute ;-).

It's maybe not a good way to do it, but doesn't Adobe have a "create PDF online" function?

Or someone with the full version of Acrobat might do it (convert html to PDF)
Maybe could you try the tryout version of Acrobat, assuming that the PDF's will be free...

pierre

Tyberius, I'll do my best to remember to e-mail you in the coming days. I'll send some more details on what I have. I am doubtful, but it's worth a shot.

Spec, I've tried Acrobat Pro (friend at the office) and it was ugly. The main problem being that one webpage doesn't exactly equal one page of print. The pages trunacate something awlful and wastes major amount of paper. So I need to get content into a word processor to take care of that. There are a few other smaller problems, but that's the big one.

wj:

quote:

---

Ah, the print variable. I've been avoiding this topic, so thanks to Emps for that. :bleh:

---

Always glad to help

I assume you've tried these resources:

:FAQ: How do I create PDF files without Adobe Acrobat?

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org

Chiming in with another offer of help.........

At my astronomy site www.dustbunny.com/afk/ I have pdfs of almost every page. I generated them using the Apache FOP tool.

Not for the faint of heart, but I've gotten fairly good at it. It does take some finagling of the content and images to make things work out, but it can be done.

I was able to do this because all the source for the site is XML. It probably is possibel to take your existing HTML and convert it to XML. If we can get that done, getting the content into PDF is more than manageable.


Few problems in life can't be solved by chocolate

Wll I have the full version of Acrobat 6 Pro, GoLive CS, and Indesign CS and could be of some assistance if the time frame is flexable. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to reformat them for PDF.

You might also check out ghostscript/ghostgum, it will generate PDF version 1.3. Should work thou I've not tested the gradient.

J. Stuart J.

Yah, XML and XSLT+FOP is probably your best bet for getting content like that into the PDF format without serious ammounts tweaking and re-formatting by hand in Adove Acrobat.

Assuming the tabels are already well formed, you could write an XSLT template to translate it into a slightly more semantic XML document which can then be used for the PDF conversion.

After all, this is the kind of stuff XML was designed for.

[This message has been edited by Cameron (edited 02-07-2004).]

TP, I got your thing and did my thing. Fair warning: I only do my thing every few days for maybe 5 minutes at the most.

Okay, I'll put together a little example package of what I have. If any of you folks care to play with it to see what you can come up with, that'd be cool.

quote:

---

I only do my thing every few days for maybe 5 minutes at the most.

---

Your wife must be one unhappy woman.

:::11oh1:::

krets:

quote:

---

Your wife must be one unhappy woman.

---

But he does it so well she demands a few days rest in between

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org

There was this one time when Woman was having a hard time walking...

Here is one of my "hidden" tutorials that I've been almost working on. Kind of funny because I've since implemented some shortcuts that obselete around 4 layers.

Anyways, this illustrates very well some of the problems that I've been dinking around with. Like the size of the graphics and the formatting/trunacating of pages.

uberskew.zip ~130k

Take it and see if you can get a decent PDF out of it if you have the gumption.

Gotta go.

Here's my shot at WJ. A bit of banding in the gradients but layout looks not bad to me.

Took a couple of minutes to produce... loaded your url in Adobe Acrobat Web capture, print to PDF.
Looks good on my Mac.

that's all...

~ edit~ Unzipped PDF is 154k

cheers
kromaZ



[This message has been edited by kromaZ (edited 02-09-2004).]

I gave it a try as well. I loaded it into GoLive SC, and received close to what KromaZ did. I then exported it to PDF and reformat the whole thing in Acrobat Pro 6. It's current formatting is to 8.5x11.

http://www.texturehunter.com/img/temp/UberSkew.pdf

Now it depend on how you wish to distrubute it. Keep in mind you are not limited to just 8.5X11. You might what to consider formating to a diffrent size. It perhap might make the reformating easyer. Sure you might waste some paper printing a slightly smaller page. But it still would print. I am thinking something similar to the old Bryce or KPT manuals. They printed well in landscape format at 8.5X11.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 02-09-2004).]

Well, crud. Those turned out better than I expected. That will teach me not to research my own material. Sorry about that. I'll get you next time.

On an even more downer note, I have apparently misplaced a bunch of my notes. Several PSDs and scrawls on paper explaining them. The major suck part is that I haven't been able to recreate the techniques just yet. Can you believe that I have techniques that fry my brain? Odd, that.

Thanks for the input and effort and all that. Time to give it a break while I try to get the other things around. Then it will be time for one final push.

Check this out also WJ.
Could be another solution.

Untested by me, since there isn't a Mac Version.
http://www.activepdf.com/en/Products/WebGrabber/Start.asp

Costs a few bucks...but what doesn't these days.


cheers
kromaZ