Hotline HTML

In my post No Panic you could already read that Foreign and Domestic Politics of Japan and I don't quite have a good relation. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the classes and thought the material was pretty interesting (no, I'm not being sarcastic), but the collective paper left kind of a bitter taste at the end. And that taste kept hanging around for a while because we (or do I mean "I"?) got two assignments with that paper as the lead; rewrite the introduction of the paper and convert it to an e-book. I had a better feeling about the first assignment because we had to work together - so I thought - and we already received the ingredients for a well-written intro: definition, controversy, motivation, objectives, limitations and different points of view. Unfortunately we didn't get the ingredients list for the conversion to e-bookformat, which could've come in handy.

During the class in which the first assignment got announced, we got to work on our introduction 2.0 per group. Well, who of your group actually took the class Methodology and Digital Literacy, which caused us to be with only half of our group. And of that half only two third contributed to our new introduction, which actually reminded me of the actual paper; some things never change (no shade). Unfortunately, we couldn't save it the way Mr. Coppens wanted: "Create new revision, no moderation." This option wasn't available for us yet, causing our work to be done for nothing (partially because I forgot to save it somewhere). Weeks later when I was converting it to e-bookformat, I realized that I still hadn't finished the assignment, so I tried to rewrite the intro by myself (with the emphasis on "tried"). Luckily, the option "Create new revision, no moderation" was available now and I could save it directly.

Converting the paper to e-bookformat I had a completely different problem: aesthetics. This because I'm a bit (now don't you fool yourself) of a perfectionist. Problem number one was that all of our names were arranged in such a clumsy way, but I couldn't fix that so it still is an issue (especially for me). The second problem was the table of contents in which I forgot to mention it is a table of contents, so I had to re-do it again. I did this for three times because I kept on forgetting to add page breaks, causing it to look really sloppy. Problem number three was giving the introduction the title of "Introduction", which I realized I forgot after the third attempt. Besides that, I'd also forgotten to give the table of contents the title "Contents", making this the fourth problem. Eventually I attempted converting my paper to an e-book for at least five times, because I kept on hoping the names would be arranged less clumsily, but as you know I failed. The e-book Scheiding van Religie en Staat is now available (in Dutch) for all of you to read (in Dutch).

Besides those two assignments I also converted my wiki-article Kenzo Takada (original: Kenzo Takada) from HTML to PDF. This went laboriously because I kept on having issues with pictures in HTML (and of course with Pandoc), as mentioned in Do Pandoctors Exist?. Perhaps I should work less stressfully and be more at ease when I try programming that stuff. Pandoc is just being Pandoc and isn't doing the weird stuff, while I'm the person who is.