Israeli Attacks Bombard Schools, Hospitals, Mosques in Gaza

Israeli Attacks Bombard Schools, Hospitals, Mosques in Gaza

A day after Israel struck a convoy of ambulances transporting critically wounded patients from the al-Shifa Hospital to the Rafah border crossing, the Israeli army has intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, hitting schools, mosques and more hospitals.

On Saturday morning an Israeli air missile struck the al-Fakhoora school run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 15 people and injuring 54, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

“The number [of deaths] is expected to rise,” said Muhammad Abu Silmeyeh, director of Al-Shifa Hospital.

Thousands of people displaced due to Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip had taken refuge at the al-Fakhoora school.

A witness to the attack who lost family members in the bombing told Al Jazeera that four people in their family were killed or injured.

“We have nothing to do with anything related to the Hamas movement. The room only had children and women,” the witness added.

Website Update. More Fanfic Style Customization

Today I updated PermianExtinction's Fanfic on my site to have my own custom formatting for the HTML, EPUBs, and PDFs.

Did you know that Calibre can convert a LibreOffice odt file to an epub? Here's an example of what that might look like:

The Empire Needs Children by PermianExtinction

I really like the autogenerated cover pages that calibre makes for epubs. They're simple but stylish. Calibre seems to randomly choose the overall color--I wonder if there's a way to purposely select a particular option.  I'm planning to go back and switch my own fic to use calibre instead of LibreOffice to generate the epubs because I really like the covers and because this way I can include an autogenerated Table of Contents from the odt into my epub.

How I Create The HTML, EPUB, and PDF Files for Fanfic on My Website

My document conversion process for my website so far can be outlined as follows:

1. Convert AO3 HTML to my own custom HTML formatting manually. Requirement: must be proficient in HTML. Knowing some CSS is necessary too, but a stylesheet like simple.css can help a lot.

2. Convert the custom-formatted HTML to a LibreOffice odt file.

3. Add page breaks as appropriate in front matter, delete HTML Table Of Contents and add autogenerated LibreOffice Table of Contents, add Title Pages (front and index pages), and add page numbers.

4. Convert to PDF. In LibreOffice, select File -> Export As -> Export as PDF -> General. Then check the Universal Accessibility (PDF/UA) checkbox. This will help to point out  some types of accessibility issues.

5. Convert to epub. In LibreOffice, select File -> Export as EPUB. Alternately, open the odt file in Calibre, choose Convert Books->Convert individually and then fill out the epub conversion options described here.

NOTE: While LibreOffice can also produce HTML pages from odt files, the HTML produced is not very amenable to manual editing, and I suspect tends to not be very accessible. This is why I manually edit my HTML instead.

LibreOffice

Never thought a personal website would teach me so much about how to use LibreOffice. By the way, if you haven't updated your LibreOffice install in a while and have a version before 7.6, I highly recommend getting the latest version. I've found the new spotlight feature can be incredibly helpful for troubleshooting style  issues.

WYSIWYG Is So Important--It Was Also A Mistake

WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) is so very vital for making computers more widely accessible but also WYSIWYG was a mistake that can make troubleshooting and maintainability a nightmare which is why we will never all be able to just open an office software document for everything. Sometimes you just need to do things with more precision and reliability than that provides.

Sometimes it's a matter of tradeoffs--trading some things being easier for others being harder.  What I want to explore is what those different tradeoffs specifically are, and what  are better ways to make those tradeoffs.

LibreOffice

Sometime I really want to talk about how LibreOffice handles images, which reaches true heights of absurdity in that the default image handling is just--so bad. The good news is that the most egregrious image problems you encounter in LibreOffice are quite fixable. However, its lack of absolute precision can still be an issue for images in certain circumstances. The thing to keep in mind though is that no matter what contortions Writer subjects your images to, you can always undo the horrors because Writer never discards anything from the original image.