On 2/12/2021 2:00 PM, Eli the Bearded wrote:
Note crosspost. c.l.postscript because I can imagine the people reading
that group have more expirience with non-home printing, and c.p.printers
because printers are involved.

Background:
There are a _wealth_ of public domain books that have been scanned and /
or OCRed available on the net now. These are great for reading on
computer devices, but what if I want a print copy?

I can, and have, naively send them to a local laser printer and get a
stack of US-Letter output. I don't really like the look or the usability
of that. Beyond the page count that I can easily staple, it's not a good
format.

I have also tried, once, the process of turning some 500 pieces of email
into a bound epistolary. (Maybe e-epistolary be correct for e-mail? :^) )
For that I scoured the net for a good Latex template for the book, and
finding none I really liked. There were a lot suitable for short
technical documents, and few good for an entire book. Some pain points:
formatting chapters, table of contents, the perfect-bound wrap-around
cover, flowing non-prose text properly (eg embeded poems). I didn't have
any illustrations to deal with in that book, but that looks intimidating,
too. Reseach papers have a very different idea of frontmatter than
novels or non-fiction books. Reseach papers need a lot more support for
foot or endnotes.

I did eventually get a PDF built with a "fiction novel" template. I made
time based divisions of the email into the chapters for for that. Then I
had Blurb (.com) print the thing for me as a trade paperback size
perfect bound book.

It's a lot better than a stack of US-Letter sized pages, but it still
leaves a lot to be desired.

Request:
So with that background, I'm curious if people know good ways to print
free ebooks. I'll give two links, to two different books at different
sites (which share the same title) as example texts:

https://archive.org/details/cu31924002801979

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26014

With the file formats there, and the whole world of printing services,
what's the easiest way to get a respectable looking printed book, that
would be conviently sized and sturdy enough to take on a field trip?
Budget is not unlimited, but not too constrained. Time to prepare the
document for publishing is more constrained.

The Batty book, eg, has a lot of detail on making field expeditions to
collect samples, so that would be a book you might want to carry off
into the field.

(I have "vintage" bound copies of both of those, and have read both. I
present them as examples where I have a known existing thing to compare
it to. Both have extensive illustations, and the occaisional table of
data. The Browne volume has a fold out map, Plate V, kinda poorly
reproduced at Gutenberg.)

Elijah
------
kinda surprised more people don't want to do this

I use www.lulu.com for printing and binding my five computer software
manuals. Each is approximately 300 pages and printed on 8.5 inch by
11.0 inch paper. www.lulu.com requires a PDF for the body, the front
cover, the spine, and the back cover. Four PDFs. The cost for each
manual is around $14.
https://www.winsim.com/doco.html

Lynn