sep-offprint is a perl script that makes offprints from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles.
Current version: 1.11, last modified August 16, 2007. Added --output command-line option. Note that since version 1.0, sep-offprint prints all supplements in the correct order, with notes at the end.
© 2006–7 John MacFarlane. This script may be freely used and modified. There are no guarantees or warranties of any kind. If you find a way to improve it, I would appreciate hearing about it.
First, download this Perl script: sep-offprint
To use the script, you will need Perl and two (free) external programs:
install script.)If you are running linux or unix (including Mac OS X), you may already have Ghostscript. You can check by issuing the command:
which ps2pdf
If it returns a pathname, then you probably have Ghostscript.
You’ll also need the Perl modules in LWP (Library for WWW in Perl). Your perl installation may already contain LWP; if not, you can install it using cpan:
cpan -i LWP
(Accept all the defaults.)
On a *nix system, you will want to put sep-offprint in your path (e.g. in your ~/bin directory) and make it executable:
chmod +x sep-offprint
You can then run it from any directory by typing:
sep-offprint plato
If this doesn’t work, you may have to modify the first line of the script, which tells it where to find perl. Replace /usr/bin/perl in the first line of the script with the path to perl on your system. To find this path, type:
which perl
On Windows systems, follow these instructions, or just type
perl sep-offprint plato
to run the script. (Note that if you use the method of associated file-types, you will have to rename sep-offprint as sep-offprint.pl, so Windows will know that it’s a perl script.)
To make a PDF offprint from the “Frege” article, just type:
sep-offprint frege
If all goes well, the file frege.pdf will be created in your working directory (so make sure you don’t already have a file by that name, or it will be overwritten). If you have not put sep-offprint in your path as described above, you will have to put the sep-offprint script in your working directory and type
perl sep-offprint frege
instead of the command above.
To find the official name of an entry, look at the URL. For example, the URL for my article on logical constants is http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-constants. The part after entries/ is the official name. So, to generate an offprint, we’d type:
sep-offprint logical-constants
Or, if you want, use the whole URL:
sep-offprint http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-constants
If you want to create an offprint from an entry on your local computer (say, one that you are editing), use a file:// URL. For example, if your entry lives in the directory /home/mmm/entries/truth, you can use
sep-offprint file:///home/mmm/entries/truth
to create an offprint from it. (The old --localpath option has been removed, as this is now the preferred way to create offprints from local entries.)
By default, sep-offprint creates PDF offprints with two pages per side, in landscape mode, using letter size paper and a 14 point Times font. All of these defaults can be changed using command-line options. Thus, to create a postscript file instead of a PDF, with just one page per sheet and A4 paper, type:
sep-offprint --1up --ps --paper a4 frege
This command will produce a file called frege.ps in the working directory.
To create a PDF with larger print and a sans-serif font, type:
sep-offprint --size 16pt --font Helvetica frege
Here is a full list of options, with defaults indicated:
--1up--2up--ps--pdf--output <filename><entryname>.ps|pdf)--font <font>--size <size>--align <align>--paper <papersize>--linkcolor <color>--help--versionDue to limitations in html2ps, sep-offprint may stumble on some Unicode characters that render properly in HTML. The following characters found in some SEP articles are not yet properly supported by sep-offprint: