I’ll be posting an update in the newsletter next week celebrating the final stretch for Logic. When we’re ready to announce, I’ll just need the blog post and a release date.
Congrats on the upcoming release number 3
1 Like
Thanks @LeighKP and @apurva! I just realized one more item–we were waiting on some resolution from an author about images in one of the chapters that don’t seem like they are licensed for reuse. I had forgotten about that part; let me check with Ben, the book editor, on those.
And yes, we still need to see if we can get blurbs of praise from the peer reviewers; I’ll check on that too. And draft the book release!
I have indeed learned a lot about LaTeX and CSS through this process, as well as how to use Inkscape. I love the opportunity to learn new things like this that will be useful for other purposes!
Oh yes — hopefully replacing the images in the chapter will not take very long. Keep us posted on that, as well as the blurbs and announcement! You can tell that we’re excited to share this resource with the world.
That’s excellent! We’re glad you got to chance to add to your skillset while working on this project. 
I ran across one stylistic issue when exporting the PDFs for chapter authors to take a look at to ensure I haven’t made any errors to the content. I can’t remember if I raised this on one of the other books yet or not.
The size of the font on the LaTeX/MathJax formulas stands out on the PDFs as a fair bit bigger than the rest of the text font, which looks a bit strange. See, e.g., the book page and take a look at chapter 3 in the PDF for example.
The EPUB version has the opposite problem–there, the formulas are in a smaller font than the rest of the text. I haven’t checked the MOBI version b/c I don’t have the right software to read it.
Any advice on this? It’s not a deal breaker or anything, but it does look a bit strange.
@christina.hendricks first off, congrats on the book!
The size of the font on the LaTeX/MathJax formulas stands out on the PDFs as a fair bit bigger than the rest of the text font, which looks a bit strange. See, e.g., the book page and take a look at chapter 3 in the PDF for example.
The EPUB version has the opposite problem–there, the formulas are in a smaller font than the rest of the text. I haven’t checked the MOBI version b/c I don’t have the right software to read it.
Looking at the epub file, I can see that it includes the equations as PNG images. However, the img tags lack appropriate CSS to adjust font-size and baseline alignment individually (just some blanket styles by class). I’m guessing the same holds true for the PNG, albeit with different effects.
I’m guessing the conversion process drops that bit of information from MathJax. I’d be happy to chat with the engineers to help preserve it.
1 Like
Hi @pkra and @christina.hendricks – the good people at Rebus just brought this thread to my attention. I’m the product manager for Pressbooks and would love to follow up to better understand the problem and how we can improve the appearance of mathematical expressions in our export formats. Are you open to/available for a brief video chat to discuss the issue in near future? You can reach me at steel@pressbooks.com.
3 Likes
Thanks, Steel & Peter! I hope you both can connect and take a look at this set of display issues.
@christina.hendricks — let’s see how the conversation gets on with Pressbooks, and keep moving with the book for now. We’ll have a better sense of the timeline for these changes once you’ve all had a chance to chat, but the good news is that any improvements that are made can be added to the book in all its different formats and we can share these updated files with readers very easily.
@pkra @steel I’d be happy to join too. I’ve sent you an email, Steel!
And @apurva, good to know that we can easily push through the updates. I’ll continue to work on the book in the meantime!
2 Likes
Colleen, just a quick note that we’re still working on the image swaps, so that isn’t quite ready for your review as yet.
We have added a blurb of praise in the book, so you could take a look at that whenever you’re doing your review of the text. I think @christina.hendricks will notify you when we’re ready for this!
I’m back to working on this book series after having been focused on so much work happening at my regular job during the pandemic.
@Apurva, I was looking at the PDF exports for this book again, and noticed a couple of issues I wondered if you or anyone else might be able to help with.
- In the print PDF (not the digital one) the png images with the argument diagrams in chapter 1 have strange lines on them (weirdly the first diagram in chapter 1 is fine, but the rest look like this):
The same thing is happening on the print PDF for the ‘exercise solutions’ section starting on p. 58 (again, the digital pdf is fine).
- Footnote 1 in chapter 3 (p. 28 on pdf) is acting strangely on both print and digital PDF. On the bottom of the page it has the first couple of lines, but then the footnote is supposed to have a couple of ordered lists (as you can see on chapter 3 on the web). What has happened is that that section of the footnote has been put into the body of the chapter rather than in the footnote, in the PDF. It appears right after the sentence at the top of the page with the superscript 1, when it should be within the footnote. See screen shot below.
I’m thinking there is something strange with using ordered lists in footnotes, perhaps, since the footnote gets messed up at the first ordered list that is supposed to be in it?
Thank you for any thoughts/suggestions!
@metatechne Thank you for offering to do a final copy edit of this book in Pressbooks! I think we are ready for that now, except for the images in chapter 4 we have been discussing (still working on those). But if you could take a look at the rest that would be great. There are still some outstanding issues with the PDF exports as noted above, but the html version of the book in Pressbooks should be fine. Thanks again!
1 Like
Great! Thanks for letting me know, @christina.hendricks. I can start the final proof tonight. I’m going to prioritize this over the Religion MSS for now and will return to the latter after I finish.
1 Like
Hi Christina, sorry for the late reply! I’ve done some troubleshooting on both issues, but have had to contact the Pressbooks team for their input.
For the images — my tests indicate that replacing the pngs with jpg files seem to resolve the errors, but I’m waiting to hear from the Pressbooks team in case they can provide a solution that does not involve replacing the images. Given that the images display without an issue in the digital PDF and other formats, it may just be a setting in the print PDF that needs tweaking. I’ll let you know when I have more info.
As for the footnotes, I’ve run some tests to isolate the text and make sure it displays in the footnote area of the page, but it isn’t perfect. You suspected correctly - introducing lists inside the footnotes has caused the issue, but it should hopefully be resolvable. I’m coordinating with the Pressbooks team on this issue as well, and will keep you posted when I hear from them!
Thank you for spotting these issues. I’ll write back as soon as I have more news.
Hi Christina, the Pressbooks team is still working to fix some of these issues.
For the images, a quick fix will be to upload the images as JPG instead of PNG. Pressbooks hopes to resolve the error (which has to do with the profile in which the PDF is created) by switching to the PDF-X4 profile for the print PDF exports. This is currently being tested and may be resolved in the next 2 weeks, but the JPG option should give you a more immediate result.
For the footnotes, the main issue, if you don’t mind me getting a bit technical, is the fact that the footnote is treated as a span element in XHTML and Pressbooks’ Prince PDF export routine. Span is an inline element, which means that it isn’t capable of receiving block element children (such as lists, blockquotes, or multiple paragraphs). The Pressbooks team may be able to resolve this by treating footnotes as div elements, which are not inline, but this requires a bit more testing. I’m still waiting on an estimation of how long this will take. If we’re not able to wait, I’d suggest working with Ben and the author to see if the footnote can be edited to display without the lists, or perhaps revised to appear in the body text.
Sounds good, Apurva–thank you for the update. Looks like Inkscape (which is what I created the images in as svg) will only export as png. I can use the GNU Image Manipulation Program to export the svg or png to a jpeg though, so let me see how that goes.
I can also convert the images to JPG if necessary, so let me know if you need any assistance.
I’ve received an update from the Pressbooks team this morning: good news is that the issue with the image may be resolved as early as this week, so we can wait on that if necessary. The footnotes problem is likely to take a bit longer to test. The soonest we can expect an update on this is mid June.
Thank you, Apurva! I think let’s wait and see on the images if that can be resolved fairly quickly. I’d rather not convert and switch out all the images if we don’t have to!
Regarding the footnote, if the book is ready to go by then maybe we just try styling it differently so it doesn’t include a list. I’m not sure how that will look, though. I will put it on my to-do list to reach out to the editor about this.
Sounds good! Thank you for reaching out to Ben regarding the footnote. If I hear anything from the Pressbooks team about both issues, I will let you know.
Hi @apurva,
I did a little testing of the footnote issue, and I tried adding
tags to make line breaks between the numbered premises, instead of using a list element. But that isn’t rendering correctly on the newly exported PDFs either. I am not sure how to make breaks between the numbered premises and conclusion in any other way. Otherwise, we just get something like:
- All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. / Socrates is mortal.
That isn’t as clear. Is there no other way to do it in a footnote?