Wapsi Square Forum

Some will remember that i began working on unofficially republishing the 70s cookbook, The Food Stamp Gourmet.



I tossed out a few samples and fragmentary progress reports on a couple of fora, and then ... nothing.

Basically, i had hit a snag in formatting, and i sort of gave up.

Well, this afternoon, i needed a recipe from it, and i hunted up my working files.

I'm using the next-to-latest version of Serif PagePlus, v. X7 (can't quite afford the upgrade to X8 at the moment), and i think i was using X5 (or even X4) when i last worked on it.

So, while im sure that i probably could have accomplished what i just did in the version that i had, the intervening years of using newer and newer versions and picking up new ideas suddenly clicked in - and in an hour or so i had it formatted the exact way i wanted it, including a PDF version that has hyperlinks from the Table of Contents to the actual recipes.

And - guess what? - I just finished uploading all 12+ Meg of it.

So, if you want it - it's definitely worth the price - click the link and pull it down.

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Oops - just noticed there are a couple minor glitches, but they don't affect the usability of the book.

Tomorrow (well, mañana) i'll fix those and upload the new version.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Oops - just noticed there are a couple minor glitches, but they don't affect the usability of the book.

Tomorrow (well, mañana) i'll fix those and upload the new version.

i hope that one of the ones you are talking about fixing is the very last page, right above the pic of the little girl... the spacing on the text in the black background text box is all squished together and almost impossible to read...

Hmmm. Didn't look like it when i first set it up ... lemme take a look.

Does it look like this (a screenshot from my PDF reader)?



To be honest, it never occurred to me that that might be hard to read. I may have to change the font, because that's how that font sets.

I'll have a go at it and also fix the one or two errors i know are there.

Watch this topic.

that's weird... when i open it directly from Firefox, it gets scrunched, like this... um, i can't upload a pic (board quota exceeded)... how do i get it to show inline like yours did? anyways... but when i open it in the pdf viewer program outside of FF, it comes out OK... so i guess it's just from my browsers viewer and not your pdf itself..

How's this? (This i to the same scale as the other one, so that you can get a feel for how they'll compare on the page.)

that's good, too... like i said earlier, when i open it directly in FF it's hosed. but when i open it in a different program (Foxit Reader) it works out fine...

scantrontb wrote:that's weird... when i open it directly from Firefox, it gets scrunched, like this... um, i can't upload a pic (board quota exceeded)... how do i get it to show inline like yours did? anyways... but when i open it in the pdf viewer program outside of FF, it comes out OK... so i guess it's just from my browsers viewer and not your pdf itself..

If you check my text when you quote, you'll see i upload them to my web-hosting (electronictiger.net)* and then use the image URL and [img] tags.

Flickr (among others) hosts images online for free, BTW, if you don't have hosting space. Also, most US ISPs allow you a gig or two of hosting space as part of your account.

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Anyway, i changed that, and, while i was at it, went back and fixed several minor problems in the text - in the process finding myself forced to delete one picture (which was only there to cover up white space at the bottom of a page) when the text on the page ran longer.

And there was another, better, version of the same illo a few pages later, so...

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* At which you can find my (sadly neglected and out-of-date) web page. (I recommend just going straight to the index of my reviews - posted on Amazon and then reposted to my site - they're mostly pretty old, but books and CDs and such don't change much with time.)

So you should download the revised version - same link.

I can confirm the problems when viewing online. Online vs offline comparison:

Sure, I'll download again; I've been meaning to do more home-cooking, for several reasons.

shadowinthelight wrote:I can confirm the problems when viewing online. Online vs offline comparison:

Yeah - looks like (at least some) on-line PDF viewer apps/plug-ins/whatever try to use standard web fonts instead of the embedded ones. Viewing it in your system's PDF viewer (whether Acrobat or a third-party program like i use) gives you the embedded fonts. (Note that it has apparently stuck in a sans-serif font in place of the serif font i used, and then spaced it to match the other font, which sets more tightly than the one it used - probably Arial.)

Or it may be because where i used font styles that the font does not natively support - e.g., bold or italic with a font that only has standard or medium - the PDF conversion produces an image of the appropriate text that matches what i'd see on my screen or if i printed from the the original DTP file (or if you print from the PDF) and sticks it in the right place. When the online PDF viewer software has to resize the image, which is a bitmap, it goes wonky.

Of course, it looks fine on my screen, because (obviously) i have all the fonts i used.

Some more screenshots. The top image is from Firefox - it looks the same in Opera (my default browser). The middle image is from FF and the bottom one from Opera. (I would include one from IE, but it crashes every time i try to use it - no idea why.)

I'm using Firefox with the latest Adobe Reader (11.0.09).

shadowinthelight wrote:I'm using Firefox with the latest Adobe Reader (11.0.09).

Yup. I don't know which of the third-party PDF readers i have on this machine Opera uses - looks as if it's PDF-XChange Viewer - i also have Foxit, but i keep that for the PDF virtual printer plugin; the reader got too annoying with the last updates.

Ah, so nice to see Fat Freddy Freakoutski in action again.

Font default problem seems right to me.

yeeeeaaah,
its a font substitute issue methinks.

Lacking specifics I apologize for a partial solution but I recall you may be able to include PDF formatting that spec's a default 'Replacement Font'.

Now to go read the cookbook...