Seraphs: NaNoGenMo2014
Generate a 50,000+ word "book" based on the Voynich Manuscript. On the design and goals for the project.
Book version
A hand-curated book version is available as seraphs.pdf, or a fully laid out book is available for purchase at cost from Blurb.
About the project
Uses the following resources:
- The Flickr API and Internet Archive Commons account to grab 18th century images based on specific themes like "biology" and "alchemy."
- Processes the resulting illustrations to match background colors and discard undesirable images.
- Uses a randomized corpus of the original Voynich Manuscript (from the EVA transcription) remapped to a public domain Voynich-like font.
- Generates a set of themed "folios" based on the themes from the original manuscript.
- Converts the output using CSS3 paged media to print-ready PDF (requires a local installation of Prince XML).
The source code in this repository is in the public domain. Note that a mix of commercial and closed-source software is necessary to generate the final output.
Installation
Set up a virtual environment:
virtualenv ve
Ensure that you have various image libraries installed (for OS X users, brew install libjpeg and brew install libpng).
Install the dependencies:
. ve/bin/activate
python setup.py develop
Get a Flickr API key and add it to a directory called secret:
mkdir secret
cat "FLICKR_KEY = 'YOUR-KEY-HERE'" > secret/__init__.py
cat "FLICKR_SECRET = 'YOUR-SECRET-HERE'" >> secret/__init__.py
Install PrinceXML (http://princexml.com/) locally.
Run the program:
python seraphs/generate.py
The program should go off and acquire a lot of images from Flickr, randomize them, and generate a PDF somewhere in the 400-page range.
Once it runs, it will cache the resulting images (as local pickle files) in seraphs/cache and pull a random set from those. Delete that directory to re-acquire the assets from Flickr.
The output will be seraphs/build/book.pdf. It will be very large (more than 1 gigabyte).
Example output
