PDF session

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Revision as of 22:41, 27 January 2025 by Manetta (talk | contribs)

PDF explorations

taking a Autoethnography media approach

(a hands on approach makes no sense, PDF is a portable document format, not written as programming language as PostScript)

what do PDFs mean to us in our lives?

Before we start, let's install some PDF manipulation tools:

prompt #1

  • find how many pdfs are saved on your computer, we can use python for this
  • get a list of filenames of all these pdfs
  • generate filename posters with PostScript and Python

prompt #2

  • pick one pdf from your computer
  • select one page, take one that represents the pdf somehow, or just one you like
  • extract this page from the pdf with pdftk
  • take 10 minutes to interview each other about this pdf: ask each other any kinds of questions about it! keep it short, 5 min each
  • make a pdf of the interview text in PostScript with Python

prompt #3

  • select 5 pdfs from your computer
  • use pdftotext and pdfimage and pdfinfo to extract material from these pdfs
  • make a selection of the materials: make a new folder, copy images in that you want to use, and make plain text (txt) files with text you want to use
  • make a new pdf with these materials using PostScript and Python

prompt #4

  • search for a pdf of a book
  • select one page from the book
  • make a visual pageborder in postscript ....
  • decorate your page and stamp your lovely pageborder onto your pdf with pdftk stamp
  • (you can do the whole book too with pdftk multistamp)

prompt #5

  • pdf imposition


Upload what you made to: /var/www/html/SI26/PDF/ so it appears at https://hub.xpub.nl/cerealbox/SI26/PDF/

We will pdfunite this into one PDF again!

(and compress it... because it will be large probably)