Splitting up Pyramid #3 issues into separate articles

[Taneli]

I've been thinking that I don't really use all the cool stuff in the many Pyramid #3 issues that much in my games, and I think that one of the main reasons is that all of those sit in their own folder on my computer, and are not part of the GURPS Books folders (where I've sorted things into their own subfolders by line, which I go through more often. Sure, I could just copy them all over to my GURPS Books folders, but most of the #3 issues do not neatly sort into just one GURPS line of books.

My solution? To split up the pdf's to individual articles. This can be rather straightforwardly done by a tool like pdftk that lets you to split up pdf into separate pages, and then recombine those as you like, but done by hand, this would mean something like checking the page numbers of all of the various #3 issues one by one, and then writing commands many times over, to boredom.

Thus, hoping to avoid some of the bother, has anyone already done some of the work and listed up all the names and page numbers of the #3 articles somewhere? I'm aware of the wonderful Pyramid Volume Three Index in this subforum, but that does not list the page numbers of the articles, and does omit the standard articles.

[cptbutton]

Not what you are asking for, but I've had good luck with the 'Advanced Search' feature in Acrobat Reader DC. It lets you search all the PDFs in a designated folder and subfolders with some useful options. And you see the results in context, i.e. the sentence they are in, without opening the PDF. Not perfect, but very useful for things like finding out all the GUPRS PDFs that contain "Service" in the agencies of Centrum context.

[RogerBW]

If I were to do this my inclination would be to parse the contents page for the article titles and page numbers and build it off that. (You'd get some full-page adverts at the ends of articles but that shouldn't be the end of the world.)

[Mack_JB]

Not Pyramid, but when I've done similar in the past, I split the PDF into individual pages as TIF files, then sort them out manually. This also allows me to delete ads in magazines I keep digitally over paper copies.

[Taneli]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

If I were to do this my inclination would be to parse the contents page for the article titles and page numbers and build it off that. (You'd get some full-page adverts at the ends of articles but that shouldn't be the end of the world.)

This is pretty much my go-to plan as well, but after several tries it seemed like it would be just simpler to write them down by hand, and as a matter of fact I had some time to kill in a train today and I managed to get the first 60 issues' indexes into a text file in the format of:

[article first page]-[article last page]; [article name]

Dash and article last page are omitted on one-page articles.

With this data it should be rather simple thing to write a script that uses an utility like the pdftk to form individual articles from the issue PDF's.

As a side note, I'm wondering how to name the article files, I'm torn between having the issue number before or after the article name. Both seem to have benefits.

[Taneli]

Yeah, regarding my previous post, I was being stupid thinking that I would do it by hand. Too much writing. x)

Anyhow, I now have a short Python script that can create a Pyramid #3 Index using the info from the pdf bookmarks, giving an output of something like in the Code-box below.

Now, I don't know if it is alright to post even this sample of the Pyramid #3 Indexes in the box below, but since this subforum already has the #3 Index posted in another thread, I suppose this isn't too bad, right?

Anyway, if it isn't bad, I have a private GitHub repo with the code, that I'm willing to make public, if there would be no issues.

    'pyramid001.qxd:Pyramid': {   'articles': [   {'first_page': 1, 'last_page': 1, 'name': 'Cover'},
                                                  {'first_page': 3, 'last_page': 3, 'name': '(Lack of) Letter Page'},
                                                  {   'first_page': 4,
                                                      'last_page': 12,
                                                      'name': 'Guildhall of the Hermetic Brotherhood'},
                                                  {'first_page': 13, 'last_page': 17, 'name': 'Necromantic Tools'},
                                                  {'first_page': 18, 'last_page': 22, 'name': 'Tooling with Curses'},
                                                  {'first_page': 23, 'last_page': 26, 'name': "Wizard's Letter"},
                                                  {   'first_page': 27,
                                                      'last_page': 32,
                                                      'name': 'Out of the Rough: Magic Gems in RPGs'},
                                                  {   'first_page': 33,
                                                      'last_page': 35,
                                                      'name': '“.” Is for Full-Stop Drum'},
                                                  {'first_page': 36, 'last_page': 37, 'name': 'Random Thought Table'},
                                                  {'first_page': 38, 'last_page': 38, 'name': 'Humor'},
                                                  {   'first_page': 39,
                                                      'last_page': 41,
                                                      'name': 'Recommended Reading: Tools of the Trade'},
                                                  {   'first_page': 42,
                                                      'last_page': 43,
                                                      'name': 'Recommended Reading: Wizards and Gaming'},
                                                  {'first_page': 44, 'last_page': 44, 'name': 'Last Word'}],
                                  'number': 1,
                                  'short_title': 'Pyramid #3-001'},