oso2pdf

Introduction

This computer program attempts to convert book chapters downloaded from Oxford Scholarship Online to PDF. The PDFs are better than those the OSO website can generate: the pages of the PDF correspond to the pages of the original book, and the typography is nicer. The hard work is done by Pandoc and LaTeX.

N.B. This software is of use only to someone who has legitimate access to Oxford Scholarship Online and has already downloaded a book chapter to their own computer. It does not make any network connections to Oxford Scholarship Online and it cannot assist in breaking the license terms Oxford Scholarship Online users are bound by.

Usage

Use your web browser to save a book chapter from Oxford Scholarship Online to an HTML file, e.g. my_chapter.html. Then run the command

$ oso2pdf my_chapter.html

which will produce files my_chapter-content.pdf and my_chapter-notes.pdf. Optionally, specify the font for the conversion; the default setting is

$ oso2pdf --font="Liberation Serif" my_chapter.html

You may pass additional arguments to pandoc like this:

$ oso2pdf --font="Times New Roman" my_chapter.html -- -V documentclass=pessay -V classoption=onehalf --template=pessay

In this example Pandoc is instructed to make use of the files ~/.pandoc/templates/pessay.latex and ~/texmf/tex/latex/pessay/pessay.cls. Indeed, any arguments passed after -- will be ignored by oso2pdf and handed on to invocations of Pandoc.

Installation

Runtime dependencies:

a working installation of Pandoc
a working LaTeX installation, including XeLaTeX
some XeLaTeX-compatible font, such as Liberation Serif

oso2pdf is available from Hackage, so if you have a working Haskell installation on your machine you should just be able to run cabal install oso2pdf. But instead, I recommend installing stack and then

$ git clone git@github.com:spwhitton/oso2pdf.git
$ cd oso2pdf
$ stack install

which will put the oso2pdf and pandoc-oso2tex binaries in ~/.local/bin, which should be in your PATH environment variable if you've set stack up correctly.

Bugs

Please report bugs by e-mail to <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> or <spwhitton@email.arizona.edu>. I'd also appreciate hearing from you if this program has been useful to you.

License

oso2pdf is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

oso2pdf is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with oso2pdf. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.