Technical aspects of generating books

  • What tools do we use to automatically generate a pdf? The graphic design of Levenshtein distance reads Cortázar is using html and weasyprint. Weasyprint does not support Javascript. All variations of the book have to be generated by the layer generating the scripts. This doesn’t have to be a problem, but it does offer a limitation. Weasyprint is implemented in Python, but it is also implementing it's own browser/render engine. The development of the library is limited.

  • Walk along the trees of Madrid is made with paged.js because it supports Javascript. On the other side it needs a browser running on the server (100MB). Another downside of paged.js is that it is running in node, that means an extra layer / technology to maintain.

  • What is the api of the publishing platform? What is infrastructure of the publishing house? On what server? How to deal with safety? How to make sure it keeps running? How to avoid server overload? Harmful robots? Or multiple users at the same time? Make a waiting row? What is the scale of this project?

  • What about the ecological impact of the 'infinite' generation of books? How do we calculate that? Include or exclude it?