Production of electronic newssheet

From BPWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

An electronic version of the newssheet and order of service is produced each week. This can then be used as an alternative to the paper version, particularly for vision impaired as it can be loaded to a portable reader and enlarged at will. It is produced in the following formats (in order)

  1. Doc - Microsoft Word 2003
  2. PDF - Portable Document
  3. ODT - ODF Text Document
  4. HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, recommended for devices that cannot handle ePub format.
  5. EPUB - Electronic Publication, recommended for iPAD

A Mobi version to suit Kindle should be produced if there is demand

Doc Version

The newssheet is supplied in this format. If supplied as DOCX convert using a word processor to Doc. Save the document with a name of the format yyyymmdd, e.g. 20131029.doc. If the document contains images check they have been reduced to 150 DPI or lower, have the cropped portions removed and JPEG Quality reduced to 75 to save on file size. If the image is JPG format but contains only one colour, e.g. sheet music then convert to PNG and reduce the number of colours in the image to four or less.

PDF Version

Convert using LibreOffice Writer by exporting as a PDF with default settings. N.B. The document usually contains Cambria, which is a Windows/Microsoft Office font. If the conversion is done on a Macintosh without this font installed the results may be incorrect.

ODT Version

Convert using LibreOffice. Make the following changes to assist with the HTML and EPUB versions

  • Save as ODF Text Document (.odt)
  • Working from the end of the document backwards
    • Remove all page breaks except for those preceding the Notices, Calendar or inserts.
    • Remove blank lines used for pagination
  • Convert two column sections used for saving space, N.B. not the Lord's prayer in Bari, this is provided as an alternate. The quickest way is to move the cursor to the relevant area, then delete the selected Section. You may need to tidy up the formatting of the text immediately after the section if it has been centred.
  • Remove all uses of Heading Styles whilst preserving font and layout (Use Advanced Find & Replace then Search for Styles)
  • Also remove the Author style which for some reason ends up as Heading 3 inside Sigil
  • Apply the Heading 1 style whilst preserving the font and layout to
    • The first line (title of Order of Service) (Cambria 25 point, Bold, Italics, Left justified)
    • ‘Light’ on the News (Cambria 30 point, Bold, Italics, Centred)
    • Out and About (if present)
    • Calendar @ BPUC (Cambria 24 point, Bold Centred)
    • Inserts (if present)
  • Apply the Heading 2 style whilst preserving the font and layout to items in the Order of Service (Cambria 16 point, Bold, Left justified)
    • Call to Worship
    • Children's time
    • Baptism (if present)
    • Communion (if present)
    • Sermon/Reflection
  • Make sure any headings are separated from their text by paragraph marks not hard line breaks
  • Remove extra line breaks in the notices
  • Apply the Heading 2 style whilst preserving the font and layout to each notice (Cambria 15 point, Bold, Underlined, Left justified)
  • Replace any uses of the word 'Refrain' with the actual refrain. The document should not require any scrolling up to use. Similarly change any responses
  • Remove any repeated (usually) double spaces after a sentence and replace with a single typographically correct space. (Libreoffice can search for non-breaking spaces as \u00a0)
  • Remove any line breaks used within numbered lists, i.e. verses of hymns.

HTML Version

Convert from ODT using LibreOffice Writer by saving as HTML. If numbered lists are exported as DIV change the HTML compatability output save format to "LibreOffice Writer"

ePUB Version

  1. Load from HTML version using Sigil
  2. Set Document Metadata
    1. Title to 'Order of Service - ddth Month yyyy'
    2. Author to 'Brougham Place Uniting Church'
    3. Language to 'English'
  3. Apply heading tags to produce the table of contents
  4. To make a valid ePub change the HTML
    1. Validate the document. Make sure Html Tidy is used, from Sigil 6.0 onwards this must be set explicitly under Preferences, Clean Source and then restart Sigil once the preference is changed.
    2. Invalid tags
      • ol start= and li value= convert manually to make the list item encompass the verse and refrain. Make sure the last refrain is part of the last verse list item.
      • td width and td height= convert manually or remove using regular expression 
        (<td[^>]*) (height|width)="\d+%?">
        replaced with 
        \1>
        applied twice.
  5. Convert curly single quotes to &#8216; and &#8217; and curly double quotes to &#8220; and &#8221;.
  6. Tidy up any formatting issues missed in the ODT stage (small fonts effectively less than 13 point possibly by adding body { font-size: 13pt; } to the style sheet, lots of vertical space etc).
  7. Tables with pixel width specified may overflow width on small screens so remove any width="nn" tags from table elements either manually or by a regular expression replace 
    (<table[^>]*) width="\d+">
    with 
    \1>
  8. Centre or Left Justify any headings that have mysteriously changed.
  9. Split into chapters making sure that there is no trailing blank lines in each chapter
    1. The Order of Service
    2. Notices
    3. Calendar
    4. Inserts (if present)
  10. Apply heading tags to produce the table of contents again after splitting into chapters (might be a Sigil bug, as you might end up with no page numbers for some sections)
Retrieved from "https://www.bpuc.org/w/index.php?title=Production_of_electronic_newssheet&oldid=5937"