Create book of abstracts from spreadsheet / google forms

Lately a friend of mine complained about interoperability of abstract submissions from numerous applicants. Having the Book of Abstracts is crucial and we faced similar problem organising #NGSchool events.

Note, you’ll need to be somewhat familiar with LaTeX in order to edit the main.tex file to your liking. If you are not afraid of that, the way to proceed is as follows:

  1. Create google form to collect necessary info, such at this one
  2. Create a new spreadsheet to accumulate responses: Responses > Create new spreadsheet
  3. Download responses spreadsheet as Abstracts.xlsx
  4. Clone abstracts repository
  5. git clone
    cd abstracts
    # install dependencies
    sudo apt install texlive-base texlive-latex-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-extra make
  6. Edit main.tex to your liking
  7. Copy Abstracts.xlsx to the repository
  8. Create pdf
  9. # prepare abstracts.tex
    # create main.pdf
    make all
    # in the case of problems, just run again this point, but first remove the clutter
    rm main.{aux,blg,log,out,toc,pdf}

    You’ll find the abstract book in main.pdf.

Convert xls table into abstract book PDF

I had to generate Abstract book for #NGSchool2016 (). I had spreadsheet generated by Google Forms with all necessary information. I could copy-paste all entries and format it later on, but I found LaTeX more robust for the task.
As I had already LaTeX template, the only missing part was conversion of .xls to .tex. Thus I have written simple script,, that generate .tex file based on table from .xls file.
This script, among many other things, convert utf into LaTeX escape characters. depends on xlrd and utf8tolatex (from pylatexenc/latexencode, but this is given as single file)

# install dependencies
sudo apt-get install python-xlrd
# generate tex

# generate pdf

Output pdf.

Batch conversion of images using ImageMagic


# install
sudo apt-get install imagemagick

mkdir tiffs
for f in *.pdf; do 
  echo `date` $f; 

For more options, have a look at ImageMagic site.

Save PDF with CMYK color encoding

Most printing services require CMYK color encoding, which is not natively supported by Inkscape. Because of that, you will need some third-party solution.

Firstly, I have tried Inkscpae extension, ExportPDFCMYK, but unfortunately it turned out not working in my setting (Ubuntu 14.04).

But then, I have came across ghostscript-based solution, that works great! Simply export your project into PDF in Inkscape and then execute:

  -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK \
  -sOutputFile=${f%????}_cmyk.pdf $f

Inspired by zeroset.