• View List of Taxa Included in the Book
• Download/view current book as a PDF.
• Update PDF (will take a few minutes; may be buggy).

I was invited to participate in authoring a field guide for Guam's most common insects. I suggested that this ScratchPad website might serve as a data source for the book and set about testing this idea. If I had access to the site's Drupal code and MySQL database, I would have written a custom Drupal publication module. As a work-around, I wrote a PHP script, bookWriter.php, which runs on my commercial hosting site server (Dreamhost.com). bookWriter.php harvests images and textual data from this Scratchpad site and writes these to a LaTex file which is processed into a PDF version of the book. (I was happy to find that Dreamhost provides LaTeX tools as part of their standard hosting package, so all the processing is done on my Dreamhost server.)

Preparation of the Scratchpad Web Site

bookWriter harvests data from two content types Image and Taxon Description. I added a vocabulary called Include in these publications and associated this with the Image and Taxon Description content types. This vocabulary contains a term, Common Insects of Guam, indicating that the Image or Taxon Description is to be included in the book. I wrote a custom view which lists taxa included in the book. This view is used as an index by bookWriter.php.

Data Entry

Data for each species page is harvested from the "panels" page for that species, specifically from content in the Image and Taxon Description panels. All data entry and management can be done on this page. Only images tagged Common Insects of Guam in the  Include in these publications vocabulary are harvested. In the book, images are displayed in the same order as they appear in the Image panel.

Descriptive text for each species is harvested from the General Description section of the Taxon Description panel.

Bugs

• Cannot handle image file names containing one or more spaces.

Example Field Guides for Formatting Ideas

Beneficial Insects and Spiders of Alaska

Pest Thrips of the United States: Field Identification Guide