PDF session
PDF explorations
taking an Autoethnography approach to media
(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?
Install yourself
Before we start, let's install some PDF manipulation tools:
- pdftk: https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/
- pdfinfo/pdftotext/pdfimages/pdffonts: http://www.xpdfreader.com/about.html
- pdfunite:
$ brew install poppler
(Mac),> choco install poppler
(Windows),sudo apt install poppler-utils
(Linux)
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 cerealbox here: /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)