Thinking With Tinderbox

Thinking with Tinderbox
21

I do hope you enjoy it!

22

Congratulations! I bought and downloaded it immediately and look forward to reading it. However, using the pdf it seems that the table of contents feature in the pdf file does not work - when I click on a link in the ToC, nothing happensā€¦ Perhaps you can fix that in a new version if anyone else can confirm that problem?

23

It seems to work for me in Preview; what pdf reader do you prefer?

24

Exciting day! New work from Mark always eagerly embraced. Purchase and download process worked smoothly. Began reading immediately.

As a dinosaur still most comfortable with dead trees, please count me as interested in a copy of the paper edition you mentioned. Iā€™ll be watching for an announcement of availability, price, etc.

Doug

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25

For all that Apple Preview is free (yay!, it lacks features missing from a full PDF editor. One known weakness is that things like annotations (in Preview) are not written back into the PDF but stored locally. Thus the external additions may not move with the PDF. This might be the issue here re failing ToCs. A properly encoded ToC should work in a PDF Reader, if the ToC is properly written into the PDF file.

But, in fairness here as Preview doesnā€™t advertise itā€™s shortcomings, how is a user of it to know. Donā€™t get me wrong, Iā€™ve beed editing several papers here (>200 references/PDFs in total) and everything works ā€¦ at least as a reader. Then again, most of those PDFs are journal/conference papers so have no ToC.

26

Thanks for the quick reply - I checked, and it works neither with Preview, nor with PDF Expert, nor in DEVONThink 3. Simply no reaction when I press one of the links.

27

The issue is likely with the app ā€˜printingā€™ the ToC into the PDF, not the app used to view the PDF.

28

But why should it then work for Mark B. @eastgate as he says? What am I missing?

29

Ah, I think I have it (had to get a copy of the book first!). Iā€™ve accessed the PDF with 3 PDF editors and one PDF Reader:

  • Foxit PDF Editor v.2024.4.1.66479.
    • In-text ToC p.3 is functional.
    • ToC items show in the bookmarks sidebar but as non-functional links.
    • Text cannot be selected/copied. Password needed to unlock.
  • Quoppa PDF Studio Pro 2024 v2024.0.1.
    • In-text ToC p.3 is functional.
    • ToC items show in the bookmarks sidebar but as non-functional links.
    • Text cannot be selected/copied. Password needed to unlock.
  • Readdle PDF Expert v3.10.14 (1112).
    • In-text ToC p.3 is functional.
    • ToC items show in the Outline sidebar but as non-functional links.
    • Text can be selected/copied! (I suspect, q.v. above, this shouldnā€™t happen!)
  • (Reader) Apple Preview.
    • In-text ToC p.3 is functional.
    • ToC items show in the bookmarks sidebar but as non-functional links. Hmm, on first downloading I thought these did work. This smells of external metadata downloaded with the PDF that gets sloughed off when you interact with the PDF.
    • Text cannot be selected/copied. Password needed to unlock.

So, is there a functional linked ToC? Yes, but only in the body text of the PDF as sequential page #3. There is no functional sidebar ToC.

IIRC the document was authored in Apple Pages. The PDF metadata reports the PDF as created by ā€œiText 2.1.2 (by lowagie.com)ā€ so Iā€™ve a hunch the PDF got post-precessed by FastSpringā€™s e-commerce toolchain.

Murphyā€™s Law, @eastgate is now travelling to a conference in Australia and may be less available than usual until his return next week (28th). I suspect any fix to the above will require re-processing from source to output (and more detailed testingā€ ).

Therefore, can I suggest people stop reporting issues with the PDF for now, until @eastgate is back in office and in a position to get to the bottom of this. As it is the PDF we have is perfectly readable, and if you need to copy text, I recommend the excellent TextSniperā€” as it uses OCR (same as built into iOS IIRC) so isnā€™t dependent on actually interaction with the body text (or use PDF Expert (see above)).

The PDF is typeset (ā€˜printedā€™) in landscape page format which is good for norma Mac desktop/laptop screens (e.g. the Mac on which you use Tinderbox) but cannot be reflowed, e.g. for reading on a phone in portrait orientation. The latter is a limitation of the PDF format as it is designed to emulate the limitations of a paper page (which also canā€™t reflow text)

I hope this helps ā€¦ somewhat. :slight_smile:

(and, in case youā€™re wondering, apart from reviewing some early drafts, Iā€™ve had no part in the PDFā€™s production. Some may wish PDF would just go away and die, and yet HTML/ePub merely brings a different set of problems. No easy wins in the post-print age; paper was so much simpler :open_mouth: )

ā€ . In fairness to @eastgate, this stuff should all just work, so Iā€™d not rush to blame the author.

ā€”. Tip 'o the hat to @dmrogers for first mentioning this excellent utility

[Dang, and as feared Iā€™m now reading the book and not finishing my HTā€™25 paper]

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30

Congratulations sir. I have been looking forward to this.

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