machinations: February 2018

Each page in the Volpi translation app is in a separate HTML file. I edit and update the individual files, and I don't maintain a single file with all of the book's pages.

However, you can generate a single HTML file with all the pages yourself, by pulling the individual pages from the app and concatenating them into a single file.

Here's how.

First create a start.html file with the HTML tags at the top:


<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

 <title>Franco Volpi - Heidegger and Aristotle</title>

</head>

<body>

    <h1>Franco Volpi - Heidegger and Aristotle</h1>

    <h2>Translated by Pete Ferreira</h2>
    
    <hr/><br/><br/>

Then create a end.html file with the HTML tags at the bottom:


</body>


</html>

Then use this PowerShell script to concatenate start.html, all the pages from the app, and end.html.

$bookContent = Get-Content 'start.html'
For ($pagenumber=1; $pagenumber -lt 118; $pagenumber++) {
    $paddedpagenumber = ("{0:D3}" -f $pagenumber)
    $url = "http://beyng.com/volpi/assets/EN/Volpi.$paddedpagenumber.html"
    $resp = Invoke-WebRequest -URI $url
    $bookContent += "<br/><br/><p style=""text-align:center"">$pagenumber</p>`n`r"

    $bookContent += [system.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString($resp.RawContentStream.ToArray())
}
$bookContent += Get-Content 'end.html'
$bookContent | Out-File VolpiBook.html

In between each page, the script inserts HTML with the page number. The padded page number is required for the page URLs - e.g. page 1 as 001. The UTF8.GetString stuff is required to keep the Greek characters from getting munged.

machinations

Sunday, February 18, 2018

How to generate the Volpi book into a single file