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> syntax highlighter

This was critical for me, but I didn't see an easy way for Markdown to bring it to my Linux+Emacs home, so I went with Org-mode.

Custom Go code parses the Org-mode syntax into HTML, WeasyPrint turns that into paginated PDF. The latter step is a bit slow, so I proofread iterative content updates in the HTML.


Web site built for the petition campaign:

https://ucstudentsuccess.org/

Direct link to its FAQ page:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxdfw0gIE2UW9k5cqtf6FVMaclI...

And here's the slick 50-page, double-column manifesto from the UC establishment, unsigned of course, on the subject -- giving us a sense of the scale of the bureaucratic blob that the petitioners are up against:

https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...


> some institutional sucker will buy the company

What sort of institutions would try to take on operating such a business? And when does word get around, and the pool of suckers dry up?


> What sort of institutions would try to take on operating such a business?

Essentially anyone - other PE funds, competitors merging, the general stock market if you take it public. And they're not wrong want to buy it - there's a valuable business there - they're just bad at assessing the right price.

> And when does word get around, and the pool of suckers dry up?

One born every minute. And it's hard to even notice you're being taken for a ride as opposed to mismanaging the business you bought or just being unlucky.


> ... markdown to HTML to PDF/X-1a processor using Python, WeasyPrint, and ghostscript.

I've been converting HTML to PDF by running WeasyPrint (latest version) with options I hoped were sufficient to satisfy the X-1a rules -- can it not quite do that? Is that why you need ghostscript?


I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with ghostscript. I would like to remove ghostscript from the mix, so when I have some time, I may try again to do it all with WeasyPrint.

WeasyPrint as a project is very much alive on Github. Filing a bug there might get your problem solved.

> A downside to this technique is that there's no guarantee that every commit will compile, which might be a dealbreaker.

To some of us, that's an essential structural criterion. Passing unit-level self-tests may be as well.


2023.

How does enforcement work? The article does not say.

HTML editions from the two sites contrast interestingly:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...

Each has its particular advantages relative to the other ...


Curious, what are the advantages you see in each relative to the other?

Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...


Personally I find the formatting used by the Gutenberg one to be a lot nicer/easier to read, despite (or perhaps because of) being simpler, more plain.

At least for the first few pages of content that I looked at on both versions.


You can contribute to Standard Ebooks by finding OCR errors, then pushing your fixes to https://github.com/standardebooks


Better machining on a Phillips tip really does help.


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