Notebook.sh

The Exploratory Programming textbook written by Nick Monfort suggests to get paper in the room again during prototyping b

This year, I'm curious to explore ways to generate these booklets from the wiki, and hook into one of the habits and rhythms at the course that is quite central: wiki editing. There is a lot to find on this wiki, some pages date from years back, which can easily turn a moment of wiki editing into discovery moments of "who wrote this?" and "oh, did this happen?".

The script below uses curl, pandoc, weasyprint, pdfbook2 and Booklet-stylesheet.css as a stylesheet to render a PDF from a wiki page.

You can copy the script and save it as a local bash file, for example: booklet.sh.

And run it with: $ bash booklet.sh WIKIPAGE, for example: $ bash booklet.sh Pen_plotters

Note that you should use underscores and not spaces in the wiki pagename!

#!/bin/bash

# insert your wiki page below, between the quotes
WIKIPAGE=$1

# Extra feature: local CSS edits first!
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# The script will only download a local "booklet-stylesheet.css"
# if you don't have this file on your computer yet;
# In other words: it never overwrites your local stylesheet!
# This allows for making custom modifications to the stylesheet
# for a specific booklet. :)
if [[ $(ls booklet-stylesheet.css) ]]; then
        echo ">>> local booklet-sylesheet.css found"
else
        echo ">>> downloading booklet-sylesheet.css"
        curl --silent  https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Manetta/Booklet-stylesheet.css?action=raw > booklet-stylesheet.css
fi

curl --silent  https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Manetta/Booklet-stylesheet.css?action=raw > booklet-stylesheet.css.tmp

DIFF=$(diff booklet-stylesheet.css.tmp booklet-stylesheet.css)
#if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
#       echo ">>> error"
if [[ $DIFF ]]; then
        echo ">>> checking booklet-sylesheet.css: local edits were made"
else
        echo ">>> checking booklet-sylesheet.css: in sync with User:Manetta/Booklet-stylesheet.css"
fi

rm booklet-stylesheet.css.tmp

# Turn the HTML page into a PDF with weasyprint
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
echo ">>> generating $WIKIPAGE.pdf (with weasyprint)"
weasyprint https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/$WIKIPAGE?action=render --stylesheet booklet-stylesheet.css $WIKIPAGE.pdf

# And finally, turn the PDF into an A5 booklet PDF for printing
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# pdfbook2 is part of the texlive-extra-utils package in Debian
echo ">>> generating $WIKIPAGE-book.pdf (with pdfbook2)"
pdfbook2 --paper=a4paper --short-edge --no-crop $WIKIPAGE.pdf