LearnPress Publication Guide » Publishing how-to

1.9 PDF output

LearnPress version: 1.5

Last modified: 26 March 2007

This document explains aspects of conversion of LP pages to PDF format that may affect editorial and design decisions. If an aspect of publication is not mentioned here, it is reasonably safe to assume that web-based publication design will transfer accurately to print. Obviously, editors should always proof a PDF carefully before making it public!

Sidebar

Sidebar length should be minimized for print. At present, sidebar content that does not fit on a single page will be cut off and lost. (Prince will force both floated and absolutely positioned content to display on a single page. I have not found a workaround.) If sidebar length is a problem in particular pages, consider using callouts. (Images may be embedded in callouts as well, using the syntax.)

Link display

As footnotes

Links in the body text will be converted to footnotes: the link is removed and the text displayed with a footnote reference; the footnote is “See [URL].” These footnotes are numbered automatically in sequence with the normal LP footnotes.

If you place the same link (same href, same text) multiple times in the body text, each occurrence will be replaced by a unique footnote. (The same is true for identical footnote references.)

As inline URLs

Links in the body text not removed into footnotes are left in place and displayed as plain text. The CSS file then specifies the display of the link href in parentheses after the link text. The following types of links are not converted to footnotes:

• Links inside a
  or

  with class “references” or “bibliography,” because we don’t want footnotes from references, obviously. This is not generalizable.

  • Warning! If an identical link appears both in and out of a references list (see below), only the link outside the list will be identified, but the first link in the body text will be replaced. In other words, only the body text outside of reference lists/bibliographies is searched, but the replace function affects the entire body text field. (This sounds illogical, but working around it would be considerably more difficult.) If your list of references comes early in the article, this may be a problem. Normally, a bibliography or list of references appears at the end of the article, and so the links to be replaced by footnotes will come before those to be left alone. In normal usage, then, no problems are anticipated.

  Links generated by LearnPress are not converted to footnotes, because typically they point to other pages of the same edition. If a link has rel=”page”, the CSS generates content “See page #” after the link.

  In the sidebar and footer

  Links in the sidebar and footer are ignored entirely and will not display as links in the PDF. I am not convinced that there is value to allowing links in sidebars and footers, but as a practical matter, there isn’t room for URLs in a sidebar, and it isn’t possible to properly order footnotes in sidebar and footer with notes in the body text. (LP footnotes are not permitted in those contexts anyway.)

  In callouts

  Links in callouts will be footnoted because they are inside the body text, but this will look strange, and I’m not sure why you’d want a link in a callout anyway.