The National Academies Press are putting some of their books on-line. I was particularly interested in the Guidelines for the Care and Use of Mammals in Neuroscience and Behavioral Research. The only “trick” is that they provide the book one page at a time (either in HTML or in PDF format). If you want entire chapters or the whole book in one file, you have to purchase it. I think it is a fair deal (how many publishers do that?).

Now, I was sure I can automate the retrieval of PDFs and obtain one file containing the whole book. They give pages 1 up to page 209. So, I wrote this small Bash script to retrieve all the pages (all the PDFs):

#!/bin/bash
# ./getbook.sh -> retrieve PDFs from nap.edu/

c=1

while [ $c -lt 210 ]
do
        wget -c http://print.nap.edu/pdf/0309089034/pdf_image/$c.pdf
        c=$((c+1))
done

In a few minutes, I was able to get all the PDFs. 🙂 Now, I want them all in only 1 PDF. Here, I’ll use pdfjoin (from PDFJam) to … join them. Of course, I can begin to type one big command like “pdfjoin 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf ...” but I was sure there is a better solution. Again, I used a Bash script:

#!/bin/bash
# ./joinpdf.sh -> join PDFs from nap.edu/

c=2
s="1.pdf"

while [ $c -lt 210 ]
do
        s="$s $c.pdf"
        c=$((c+1))
done

pdfjoin $s --fitpaper false --paper a4paper --outfile book.pdf

Now, I have a wonderful book.pdf that I can read on my computer or print on a printer. 🙂

P.S.1: it’s not Perl but I am sure there is more than one way to do it
P.S.2: you can join the two Bash script to to everything in one go. In this case, it would be interesting to create a variable for the maximum number of PDF available (210 in the two scripts above).
P.S.3: as usual, explanations around these scripts are longer than the scripts themselves!

Today was the last day to get rid of all the old computers and electronic devices we could “store” in our lab. As you can see below, they are mainly broken screens …