I want to bring out a paperback version of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. It remains available free online in various places. Unfortunately I cannot find an electronic version of the original text, it being somewhere on what has become a large collection of dead laptops.
I therefore subscribed to Adobe Professional and tried to convert one of the online PDFs, but the result was gobbledegook. Can anyone help me with this, and provide a version I can work on in Word or any other programme which works with Open Office Writer? I need to make a couple of corrections and reformat.
If anybody is really clever and can change the text on the cover artwork to a flame orange that can be read, that would be great too.
The contact button at the top of the page works to get me.
Thanks x
@Tony M: the cover page graphic has nothing to do with the problems concerning the text extraction — there are different reasons. I’ve overcome them.
@Craig: I’m just finished with tidying up the source text as valid Markdown. Now almost perfectly converted documents are available in these different formats: PDF from LaTeX, LaTeX, ODT (Libre/OpenOffice), DOCX (MS Word), HTML, EPUB3. — Everything perfekt with footnotes, bookmarks, bibliography and spell-checked (some corrections where due). If you respond to the mail I sent you, I’ll hand over the different files and then you are free to start with your intended editing work…
I can’t tell from the comments if you have a usable copy yet. I downloaded the PDF file and used an online service to convert it into JPGs. My OCR software can now read the pages, but it would need to be proof read again as it is not perfect. I can continue with the process and send you the resulting text file if let me know if you want me to proceed with that.
RepublicOfIsraelHaters
“I am a Zionist,” Conservative Party leader David Cameron told an audience of party supporters of Israel in London on Tuesday. “If what you mean by Zionist, is someone who believes that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country then, yes, I am a Zionist and I’m proud of the fact that Conservative politicians down the ages have played a huge role in helping to bring this about,” Cameron declared.
The Conservative leader was guest of honor at the Conservative Friends of Israel annual business lunch, which was attended by some 500 people – including half the parliamentary party, 30 Conservative parliamentary candidates, former leaders, lords and Israel’s ambassador.”
______________________
You are very boring as well as being a Holocaust denier.
The above has been posted at least ten times on this blog already(just in the last six months or so).
We want fresh croissants on here (non-kosher if you prefer), not stale buns!
Thanks.
Looks like pdfkungfu has cracked it, well done. In brief what was used/required.
PrenezGarde, the zip and pdf within scan clean for me with Clamscan.
It does seem an issue that there are so many versions floating around, I have one originally from this site or Clark’s site some time ago, a second version is on moonofalabama, another differently filesized version is on wikispooks. Time to start using and publishing checksums folks, at the least simple md5sums, so we know what we’re getting is the real unaltered, unadulterated true thing.
Too much stuff to read and only so many waking hours in the day!
PS to RepublicOfHolocaustDeniers
Your contribution on David Cameron was by far the best one to help Craig recover an online version of his book. 🙂
@Tony M
Checked again. Eset endpoint security for android reports:
Trojan.Android.Exploit.CVE-2013-4-787 A found in cot-murray.zip.part
The version from Wikispooks is clean.
The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known
Author’s Preface
I spent the eve of the Millennium in my garden, on the spacious lawns
of Devonshire House in Accra […]
[Craigmurray.org.uk – Matt, thanks; your attempt worked, but you can’t submit the result as a comment because it is too long.]
PDFKungfoo: Thanks so much for the tip-off about the clean pdf version on Wikispooks: the skewy ones were proving very awkward.
Craig: I’ve built a Word document (including the cover etc.), using custom styles for consistent formatting. It’s pretty close to the original, and is designed for easy editing. I’ve mailed it to your RU account. (The file size is about 5MB, so it might bounce back; if so, I can send you the version without the cover graphic, which is around 250K.) Please give me a shout before you go to print with the next edition. I fixed a few proofing errors from the original.
Just in case my last comment wasn’t clear (and in order to add some details):
1. I have generated (and sent to Craig) the following document formats from one of the online available PDFs:
2. Each of these is spell-checked.
3. Each of these is automatically generated from a single source format, called “Markdown”.
4. Markdown is a simple text format that can be edited in any text editor (even MS Word, if you like).
5. Each of the above formats can be styled differently/individually during generation from the source.
6. It takes only about 1 minute for me (or anybody else) to generate all the wanted format(s) once the Markdown source is finished (edited and approved) by the author.
7. I’ve used Pandoc as the conversion tool.
Awesome thoroughness, PDFKungFoo! I clearly can’t hold a candle to your LaTeX skills; I’m more focused on making operation intuitive for ordinary users. Fwiw, I used to design professional Word templates (with VBA and .net, SQL connections, SharePoint etc) for corporations, including Microsoft, automating things like brochure production for novice admin staff. Horses for courses I guess! Anyway, I can probably still contribute somehow: I’ve edited academic publications, so can help with copy-editing and proofing. It would be great to work with you on this.
@SamX: No, I’m not in any way a LaTeX guru. I’m not even a beginner…
The magic comes all from the Markdown+Pandoc couple. The secret is to prepare a good Markdown text source — Pandoc then does the conversion.
To apply different styles to ODT/DOCX you have prepare styled template/reference docs for the target format. These templates/references you have to write+save in the native application though (MS Word/LibreOffice/OpenOffice).
For LaTeX a lot of different styles are also available.
For HTML and EPUB styling you use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), are just leave the default look.
Oh, and did I mention that Pandoc is Free and Open Source Software, and available on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX?
Very useful info! I recall some colleagues mentioning Markdown, but I didn’t know it integrated so well with other platforms and applications. That’s another tool to add to the skill set! Thanks, Pdfkungfoo.
Craig,
STATUS UPDATE URGENTLY REQUIRED!!!!
Have you now got a version you’re happy with? Is so, stop wasting people’s time.
All these poofy Southern document manglers. What’s wrong with Tipp-Ex? When I were a lad we had to carve each letter by hand on a steel sheet and got thrashed if we got e before i (except after c).
Etc…
The cheek of Labour MSP James Kelly, to moan about Keith Brown giving a 10 year contract to a Dutch firm, if Labour had repealed the Railways Act of 1993,in which they had 13 years of Westminster power to do so, Mr Brown could have given the contract to a home grown firm, but they didn’t.
Instead Mr Brown had to award the contract to a company outside the UK. this is a typical reason why Scottish independence is needed to further Scotland’s prospects, Westminster is only a hindrance.
Nick Clegg says the Lib Dems have “learned from their mistakes”.
I’ve learned from mine too – and won’t be voting for them again.
Many many thanks to all. Unfortunately the flu kicked back with a vengeance and the entire world is shifting and spinning, so haven’t been able to look at the several different helpful emails that have come in.
Have never had such a bad flu, at least in adulthood. Am comforted by the fact that my brother, who has the same flu, had to take several days off work for the first time ever.
What about a blog post of the best (and the worst) front cover re-designs submitted? My ever so humble effort, strictly within the parameters expressed above (I mean flaming letters, how late-90s and cliched), and thus not all that imaginative or deviating from the original too much is here.
This is all a cunning stunt, as I’ve been re-reading the book and no doubt many others are too, owing to this renewed interest in it. Either that or Supertramp are planning on making a comeback.
@SamX:
Then get in touch 🙂
Tony M: “What about a blog post of the best (and the worst) front cover re-designs submitted? My ever so humble effort, strictly within the parameters expressed above (I mean flaming letters, how late-90s and cliched), and thus not all that imaginative or deviating from the original too much is here.“
How could I resist. I’ve kept my changes to a minimum too. Here it is.
That’s the sort of thing I was thinking of, all it needs to further confusion is a green mamba. I didn’t notice the sash or bowler hat right away, my eye was drawn to the probably deliberate change from Togo, to Toga.
Hi Craig, Tried to email you this. Don’t think it worked.
http://s338.photobucket.com/user/ishim42/media/01togo-front-cover3_zps61eff1a6.jpg.html
It’s not very finished (text at the bottom is too big ect) but it could be sorted and made neater/changed a bit if you like. I haven’t spent much time on it yet as I did not know if you had something already. Kept me out of trouble this evening anyway.
Clicking magnify, then viewing image in browser gets full size I think.
@Ishmael: Nice one (much better than mine!) — I like best so far 🙂
What’s also good: There’s a distinct visual difference as well as a similarity to the original. This makes one (who knows the original cover) to immediately realize: “This must be a new edition of …”
“….. my eye was drawn to the probably deliberate change from Togo, to Toga.”
oops …. er, yes, of course it was deliberate …. tum ti tum …. [whistles innocently] ….
+1 for Ishmael’s contemporary front cover. I didn’t change much in my version, just coloured the title style and put a contrast box behind the recommendations.
@pdfkungfoo. Quick query: what to do with the index? If the pagination differs slightly in the various formats (or editions?) the page references in the index will be out, so the index would need rebuilding. I’ve started inserting bookmarks and index fields to match the entries in the original, but I don’t know how to make it multiformat-friendly. Can Markdown/PanDoc handle XE fields and other hidden codes?
If you wanted us to convert it for you, wouldn’t it have been a good idea if you gave us a link?
@SamX: The index can only be built (if required) once Craig is done with his editing. (If you start doing it too early, the work may be in vain and has to be done again.)
Unfortunately Markdown/Pandoc cannot (yet) automatically build indices. It can handle tables of contents (ToC), footnotes, bookmarks (internal crosslinks), lists/tables of images, lists/tables of formulas and bibliography entries — but but not (yet) indices.
In Craig’s original book the bibliographic entries are given as footnotes, with an end chapter listing the bibliographic sources one more time. It seems to have been created originally in OpenOffice (where OpenOffice’s semi-automatic index creation feature was used) and then converted to the final PDF.
Which format are you working in? ODT? DOCX?
Thanks, It’s just a rough sketch, thought at least it may spark other ideas.
Going with the flame idea makes it hard to be effective on such a light picture. It gets the idea across. I think it could be more flame like, less blood like perhaps.
More glowing like this. http://s338.photobucket.com/user/ishim42/media/ghost_zpsfd5ab7e0.jpg.html
But yea, this sort of thing is more effective on dark.