I've gotten several requests for PDF (Portable Document Format) versions of my stories. I'm generally not a big fan of PDF, for several reasons.
(Warning: Grumpy Old Man rant coming up!)
First, PDF is fine for printing, but for reading on screen, it's painful. With larger monitor sizes these days it's not so much a problem, but I've been around long enough to remember trying to read PDF's on a 15 inch screen, which really wasn't pleasant.
Second, PDF is an end format, not meant for editing. I've had bad experiences looking online for ebooks and finding only PDF versions. I like to reformat all the books in my digital library into a consistent format, so that I can set up a method to convert them to other formats as needed, such as on an ebook reader. PDF's formatted for 8.5" * 11" make the process tedious, if not outright impossible. I do not want my readers to have to go through the same problems. That's why I prefer to use HTML. That way, anyone with a bit of knowledge (and a text editor) can do whatever they want with them, making them easy to convert.
Third, if I'm going to convert everything I write to PDF, I want the process to be as quick and easy as possible. No fighting with various tools, making manual edits on each one in order to get the Table of Contents to work or the right formatting for the chapters. Specifically, I wanted to be able to convert directly from the HTML without any touch-up work. I figured that was an impossible dream.
(End of the Grumpy Old Man rant. Now get off my lawn!)
Because of the interest in PDF however, I was willing to do some experimenting. The results were surprisingly positive. I opened one of my stories in OpenOffice and immediately exported it to PDF. What I found was that it worked almost perfectly. I just needed to make some minor changes in my standard style sheet, changes that wouldn't even affect what it looks like online. That meant that I just had do a one-time change to all of my current stories (which I was planning to do anyway in order to accomodate multi-layer stories like Allison and the Primdales), and then export them to PDF. Hooray for clean, minimally formatted HTML!
I'll be the first to admit that the resulting PDF's aren't the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Like my web pages, they're simple, plain, basic, and easy to read. That's the most important thing, after all.
And with this change to the stylesheet, I've made it easy for you to generate your own PDF's in whatever size you want, assuming you have OpenOffice. But considering that you can download it for free, I figure I've removed as many obstacles as possible. Just open the HTML file in OpenOffice, set the page size to whatever you want, then Export to PDF (uncheck the "Export Notes" option to avoid an ugly graphic at the front). It even creates a Table of Contents.
There are no doubt dozens of other ways to convert these files, but this one's really simple and seems to work just fine.
Unlike the text and HTML versions, I only converted the full books, not the individual chapters. I don't know why anyone would want just the individual chapters in a PDF anyway.
As a side note, I've uploaded new versions of all my stories, with the new stylesheets. You won't notice any difference except that I might have made one or two minor edits in some places, usually just spelling or grammatical corrections. If you've downloaded them before, there's no need to download them again unless you're a perfectionist and absolutely have to have the latest and greatest versions.
I used this as an excuse to do a major overhaul of the site that I had been planning for a while. It was mostly just rearranging files and adding links to the text and PDF versions of the stories on the main pages, so you shouldn't notice much of a difference from before.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.