Recently. Recently, in the last 48 hours, I figured out a few things that I would need to do at some point while my book is taking shape. Those few things were:
- Put artwork on my cover in the PDF.
- Merge the cover and title page PDF to my main pages PDF.
- Add bookmarks to my PDF.
So I found an online service called PDFescape that's free and lets me upload my cover PDF and then upload a PNG which I can then drag over the cover page in the PDF and then save it as a new PDF. So that makes the cover of the book for the moment.
And I found a Python script that merges PDF files into one PDF. This saved my life because my book may end up being over 100 pages. Most free online PDF services will not work on documents over 100 pages. The Python script needed a library to run. Two seconds later, I was running the Python script to merge the two PDF files together. That's how cool Python is. It's the number one computer programming language right now as I type for a reason.
I also found a SourceForge app called jpdfbookmarks. It's old. It needs Java 1.6.0 to run. I have Java 1.8. But what the heck? I went and installed the old Java. Then I installed the bookmark program from 2008. It ran. It was glorious. It allowed me to open the merged PDF book I have written so far, and add bookmarks to its blank slate. So now my book will have bookmarks in it. I threw some money at the bookmark guy's PayPal account to thank him for the app of the year (at least in my case).
To many, this is nothing new. But this is my first time ever writing any kind of book that isn't a user guide or operations manual. I'm doing everything from scratch and by hand almost with this project. Nothing is automatic it seems.
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