nlpltc: Generate a nice-looking printed LibraryThing catalogue

William Denton [email protected]

Written for the Hackfest at Access 2010 (15 October 2010, Winnipeg MB).

Thanks to Hackfest project partners: Ganga Dakshinamurti, Wendy Huot, and Rebecca Larocque. Chris Charles found and fixed a bug at Hackfest at Code4Lib North (6 May 2011, Hamilton ON).

First, obtain a CSV export from your LibraryThing collection: https://www.librarything.com/more/import

Then:

$ nlpltc your-lt-export.csv > catalogue.tex
$ pdflatex catalogue.tex

That will produce catalogue.pdf.

LaTeX! The TeX Live distribution should include everything you need.

Also Ruby. You will also need the htmlentities gem (you may need to run this under sudo):

$ gem install htmlentities

• Automate the getting of the export file (if you know a cookie?)
• Make it look the way Wendy specified (fonts/indenting)
• Do a subject listing, by tag
• Use Common LaTeX Service Interface (http://clsi.scribtex.com/) to automatically generate the PDF, which would mean users didn't have to run LaTeX themselves, thereby making this whole thing a lot easier to use